The Inquisitor (2014)
Since this is ProcJam week, there are a lot of ProcJam projects I’d love to talk about…but they aren’t finished yet. So instead, I’m going to talk about one from last year’s ProcJam.
The Inquisitor, by Malcolm Brown, is a murder mystery with a procedurally-generated murder to solve. You get to look for clues and interview suspects, trying to work out who committed the crime and why.
Simulating a murder like this is, I think, one of the best approaches to implementing a video game mystery game. The classic whodunnit already has enough elements to be approached as a system, and it avoids some of the problems with interactive detective stories, where you have to second-guess to author to figure out the clues. Here, the clues are spread liberally around and the puzzle is figuring out how they all fit together and who has been lying to you.
I happen to think that a more sophisticated version of the murder mystery system here could easily turn into a genre by itself. Though, of course, it helps that it’s abstracted: the clues are allowed to fit into the game’s toy world, rather than trying to force them to be too realistic. Likewise, the framing of the game, where you are an inquisitor rather than a modern police detective, lets the game pleasantly get away with the charmingly intrusive prying that keeps the mechanics simple.