Narrative Flood

Marlowe and Me

“He was dead. Dead like his carpet was ugly. Very, very dead. And covered in weird stains I chose not to investigate.”

Looking back over adventure history, something that’s always stood out for me is how few detective games there are. Let me clarify before you start listing them. Yes, Cruise For A Corpse, Max Payne, Heavy Rain, Emerald City Confidential, Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, Tex Murphy, Nightlong, Blade Runner… there’s definitely no shortage of games where you play a detective character, but very few that focus on actually investigating things. For the most part, you simply solve the puzzles in front of you and eventually the plot is explained, the villain cornered. You don’t really investigate the case any more than you really learn how to cast fireballs in D&D.

The main reason for this is that while mysteries are fun to solve, not solving them is a different matter, and few of us have a Holmes level intellect. Going to all that work and effort only to be told “Wrong!” or worse, “Maybe…” wouldn’t be remotely satisfying. There are ways around that (if I was making an episodic adventure series, I’d almost certainly be looking at a detective style affair merging the existence of online communities and the small-scale nature of the classic stories) but never anything that’s really nailed the experience I want out of a proper investigation.

Individually though, games have served up all the pieces. The Last Express nailed the small-scale design and highly effective real-time element. Roberta Williams’ The Colonel’s Bequest and its sequel, The Dagger of Amon Ra handed the investigative reigns over entirely, ending on a quiz that tested your observational skills and determined how good the ending you got was. And then there’s Private Eye, a 1996 adventure with one genuinely clever idea that really deserves to be stolen…

“I drove a while, listening to my awesome soundtrack. It helped.”

Private Eye (Private Eye: Philip Marlowe on the box, Philip Marlowe: Private Eye in the game, leading me to suspect that they were worried gamers wouldn’t know who they were talking about) is pretty much a straight adaptation of the Raymond Chandler story “The Little Sister” – not one of my favourites, but never mind. Right away, it scores a few points by actually offering two versions of the story. The original comes from the book. The alternative one switches around the details, villain and motive, although it’s the same game in every way that counts.

If you haven’t played it, it’s not really worth checking out. The investigation is incredibly basic, the pace stodgy, and most of the big decisions are straight-up binary choices that don’t matter as much as they clearly should. It’s not bad, just not particularly interesting, and like many faithful conversions, doesn’t do enough to jump between printed page and actual game.

It does however have one genuinely clever idea: the evidence system. Traditional adventure logic is that you pick up everything in sight, but here, taking the murder weapon from a crime scene isn’t necessarily a good idea. I love the idea that you might actually have to think about things like that, and it’s just a shame that much like Westwood’s Blade Runner adventure, it never actually makes much of its ideas. Still, it really got me thinking about the possibilities, especially if you mix in a bit of The Last Express style time rewinding. Take the gun and risk being caught before you can dispose of it? Or leave it where it is, and risk getting shot when you confront the villain? I’m a big fan of adventure games presenting problems rather than puzzles, and small-scale design allows for some pretty intricate examples. One of my favourite parts of The Last Express involves hiding the fact that you’ve stolen the villains’ treasure, which you can do by either hiding it and holding up your empty hands, or simply locking yourself in your room until they go away.

I want more puzzles like that. I want to play with these worlds in the same way games like Deus Ex encourage us to, not by adding guns – add a gun and every problem magically turns into a target – but by adding the world building that we take for granted. Speaking as an adventure fan of old, I find it almost embarrassing that Hitman: Blood Money is the game I have to hold up as proof that it can be done. Games like Private Eye may not be great, but they remind me how many untapped ideas are still out there in this old ‘dead’ genre. I doff my fedora to it for that, at least.

Even if I’m never likely to play it ever again.

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