Celestianpower's review: An Act of Murder

This is my review for An Act of Muder :slight_smile:.

As the title suggests, this is a murder-mystery game, which casts you to investigate the murder of Frederick Sheppard, who was to put on a musical called “Twisty Passages”. This was the first murder-mystery IF I’d played, and I must say I was rather impressed. Puzzles really aren’t my strong suit, so I reverted often to the hints, but that didn’t seem to hamper my enjoyment. I did find the clues by myself, but I didn’t quite know what to do with the information they gave me, which is more than likely due to my inadequacies than to any problems with the game. And the hints system was excellently implemented, and inordinately helpful.

The coding was perfectly competent, with nice room descriptions and plenty of conversation topics coded. I did however notice lots of missing actions, and a few lacking scenery objects. “Open window” and “look through window” should have elicited responses, for example. However, a few things did get funny responses, which gave the game a lovely tone, and stopped it from being depressing as murders can often be. Comments like “It’s a long, steep drop to a rocky death that way, and you’re not feeling particularly suicidal. ” are typical of this.

Another interesting feature of the game is that it was timed, 1 turn is 15 seconds of game time. Whilst I’m usually distinctly wary of such time limits, this one seemed reasonable (it gave plenty of time), and really added to the mood.

So, overall, a nice game, good plot, relatively well-implemented, and a nice use of an hour or two. I would give it 8, but I have to knock off one point for the dead body manipulation. Final score: 7.

Cool – keep 'em coming!! :slight_smile:

I need to gather links to review sets and post another topic like last year to collect them in one place.