Why Don't Mystery Games Need Mechanics?

there is nothing I love more than a good mystery story whether it's classic detective Noel's like The Maltese Falcon more modern televised sleuthing shows like twin peaks' and even mystery movies like the brilliant clue or knives out unfortunately I can't say the same for mystery focus video games

which have been a little bit here miss in la noir the crimes don't require any sort of thought on the players part to solve because Cole's magical ability to tell whether a bit of evidence is gonna be useful or not makes investigations a cinch in the batman arkham

games starring supposedly the world's greatest detective finding out what's going on is as simple as looking at a bullet hole with your magic batter vision whereupon Bruce will just tell you and in heavy rain the focus is less on solving a genuinely quite compelling thriller plots and more

on trying to get your head around weird QuickTime events and confusing plot holes for a long time mystery stories in video games have been mixed to say the least but over the last year a mountain of utterly fantastic games built around solving mysteries of come out of nowhere

and have completely changed my mind I'm talking about stuff like disco Elysium heaven's vaults and outer wilds as well as a few others but what did they do differently that means I now suddenly like mystery games I think 20:19 mystery Renaissance is down to the fact that all

of these games go back to the roots of what makes a mystery fun to solve in the first place so what does make a mystery fun to solve well my dear viewer it's quite elementary the best mystery stories are the ones where you as the reader viewer or

player are given all the tools you need to crack the case using nothing but the available evidence and your own brainpower in Sherlock Holmes and the adventure of black Peter it's perfectly possible to suspect that black Peter was murdered by a fellow sailor and not this cockney scamp

before Sherlock Holmes you can do this by noting – the tobacco and rum found at the scene of the crime are favoured by c1 hey suspecting the black Peter has a few skeletons in his closet and that it would take considerable skill with a harpoon to pull this

off it's this aspect of challenge and extra effort the reader has to go through the makes solver the end of a classic mystery story so damn satisfying you could almost say that a good mystery is kind of like a puzzle set by the author to be solved by

the audience and you wouldn't be too far from the truth just as the investigator in a good crime fuller is running around trying to figure out whodunit and matching wits with a criminal mastermind so is the reader engaging in their own competition against the author a mystery just

like a puzzle is also bound by rules if you cheat by skipping to the end or the author cheats by not having everything be explainable then the integrity of the challenge is broken and the payoff for the end is ruined a great mystery game doesn't need QuickTime events

or a big open world or stealth action mechanics to make it a game because mystery stories are pretty much already games taking the form of a single massive abstract puzzle unfortunately making a good mystery game is a bit harder than just slapping an existing story on top of

a level you can run around in in books movies and TV authors are able to pace out clues and tightly control what their audience gets to see and when however in video games players need and expect a degree of freedom this can lead to them solving the case

too early not finding critical evidence or just getting lost or confused trying to control the players by forcing them to investigate in a certain way cheapens the act of solving the mystery but just leaving players that their own devices might lead them to having a less satisfying or

outright broken experience it's a real conundrum but when a truly special game does manage to sites that these problems they can create an experience even better than the genre defining greats because the solve comes entirely under the power of the player now I could ramble about how much

I love classic whodunit forever but instead I'm gonna break the structure of a good mystery down into what I think of its most important parts questions evidence twists and the solve I'm gonna go through these four one by one to work out how more recent video games create

a compelling mystery without falling into the traps of their predecessors let's throw it questions shall we because the fun of mystery stories is contained within the narrative itself it's important to immediately hook players and get them engaged in the inner workings of the story itself and the best

way to do that is to get them asking questions the central conundrum of outer wilds is an incredibly complex solar system spanning sci-fi adventure but by using a light touch it's able to get players interested in finding out what's going on without intimidating them by seating interesting questions

all over the starting planet of timber half this big spooky statue head was found on Giants deep these weird gravity distorting crystals and no my artifacts were found on brittle Hollow the ruins at timber hearth spall give you some juicy details about ash twin and ember twin and

the route to dark bramble starts with this cute little amethyst guy and this weird plant the crash-landed nearby that is somehow able to teleport your drone into dark bramble itself each of these little clues pose interesting questions to particular kinds of players and give them a concrete Doland

death nation to investigate first if those weren't enough you can also track the signals of your fellow astronauts there's one on each major planet and each one points you to an introductory mystery to help you get to grips with their respective locales by splitting up a larger mystery

into smaller parts each with their own associated questions and puzzles you can prevent players from getting overwhelmed and also control where they go first to stop them accidentally solving things too quickly however it's important to keep the process of asking and attempting to answer questions moving along at

a good pace the more time players spend away from the story doing other things the greater chance there is that they'll forget connections between ideas lose track of what they're supposed to do or simply get bored but making getting that information as smooth as possible players can spend

more time doing the fun stuff heaven's volt is just brilliant of this the game sees you translating ancient writing to figure out some even older spooky mysteries and because you've got a piece together the story from fragments of text making sure that you could reasonably deal with the

mountains of information you get given is critical instead of requiring you to write down every word and translation in the game heavens vault stores all of your findings in a single massive timeline based on what a liar thinks they're from and on a different screen the tracks when

you acquired them along with the description of the item and how you got it as well this is especially helpful when you unearth some bombs show evidence and need to change your translations to fit an inscription you might have thought was Emperor Spanish trebles might have actually been

Empress buried robots and rather than having to go through your notes and change everything heaven's thought helpfully updates all your translation attempts as you change your mind the aim here isn't to make the mysteries easier just to reduce the amount of busy work and keep the solves coming

ancient words using similar characters often have similar meanings and so rather than having every puzzle be an exercise of pausing meticulously comparing words and then deciding on a meaning heavens vault simply shows you some similar looking guesses crucially without telling you whether you're right brilliantly simulating the way

cognitive biases can lead you astray as well as giving things are much more even pace return of the overed in might be from 2018 but it hits many of the same notes the nautical mystery on offer here is a deeply interwoven an incredibly complex logic grid of names

causes of death and jobs but the Oba Tim makes sure to the act of collecting the evidence needed to work out who's who is as easy as possible locations of vignettes are automatically noted the game tells you who appears where and even gives you transcriptions of every conversation

these details are all crucial to solving the mysteries of the Oprah din but simply doing data entry isn't much fun so the game just skips it for you helping the player too much though can have its downsides if the mental game between designer and player gets too easy

people are just gonna get bored messing with the players expectations is a crucial element of mystery stories and it's why they're so formed of twists and fake-outs because these literary techniques are an excellent way to stop the audience from getting complacent the great hypnose space outlaw uses twists

to keep the player on their toes and stop them from thinking too rigidly because the game's best puzzles are all about using readily available information in new and interesting ways around midway through the game in which you play an alternate universe late 90s internet moderator you're tasked with

tracking down some bits of pirated music listen muses have uploaded and shutting things down but it quickly becomes apparent that you aren't gonna be able to find it on the break of the accessible web pages and you'll need to do a bit of digging so you track down

the name of one of the songs which points you to this page about a tennis conspiracy theory which says he got the pirated music from this guy gearhead Greg who offers tech support security advice and also seems to know about a secret file-sharing site hmm so this site

called flip needs a login to access and we know gearhead Greg as a member so we need to find his password players will quickly spot that Greg has a whole page dedicated to teaching people how to say a secure password using your age location and favorite hobby he

even references himself in the example and it's at this point that experienced pole solvers who followed the obvious breadcrumbs roll their eyes at the tried and true hidden in plain sight password and input the code only to be told that they're dead wrong it's pretty clear that the

hero space devs knew that players would think they were really clever for inputting the example password because as far as I'm aware it doesn't actually work anywhere at all it's a great little joke at the expense of people who thought that they are a little bit too clever

for the game like me and helps bring the player down a few pegs these little jabs don't stop the investigation in its tracks but instead encourage players to look a level deeper and challenge themselves rather than settling into a routine based on what tropes and techniques they've already

seen it's important for the mystery designer to stay one step ahead of the player if a player tackles a mystery with narrative patterns that they're already familiar with it's very possible that they'll solve the case just by recalling a different story that did this twist already instead of

actually engaging with the puzzles that the designer works so hard on the first case of the third Phoenix Wright game is a really memorable example of this the witness one missed Dahlia Hawthorne is so lovely and so sickeningly saccharine at all times that it's impossible not to immediately

see the twist of her actually being evil coming about eight million miles away because the game has already pulled this trick several times already what's supposed to be a cool shocked moment that sets up a genuinely quite sad ending to the case as well as a recurring villain

loses a lot of impact because of just how easy it was to work out the killer's real identity a motive long before you're supposed to let's quickly recap before we continue mystery stories are all about solving puzzles contained within a narrative and for those puzzles to be solved

well in a fun way players need to be free to ask and answer questions it's got to be easy to gather up the information you need and the answer can't be too predictable well the trick to a good solve just like I said in the beginning is in

the challenge of proving to the game and to the designer you've solved the mystery and know what happened only then can you get the fantastic payoff of watching all your hard works like neatly into place and getting to am I the mystery being unraveled but it's not always

that easy players will often unintentionally try to skip around actually working this stuff out and accidentally mob themselves of the satisfaction of the solve this is a real problem in games like the vanishing of Ethan Carter where the central mystery is pretty good but the mechanics of the

game means that you don't actually have to understand what's going on in order to proceed for example these time line assembly puzzles where you test your knowledge of the evidence and context by putting together snapshots of the past in chronological order are significantly quicker and easier to prove

force than they are to actually understand whereupon they'll just tell you what happened anyway the important thing is to make solving the case require that understanding and to make it so the players are forced to engage with the mystery on its own terms in order to win her

story and to a lesser extent telling lies are greater this both games involves searching a database of video footage to collect evidence and work out what happened the way through a mysterious woman suspected of murdering her husband or a government agent who's gone to cover almost invariably pyres

looking to get the juicy details will search for stuff like murder or killed in order to get to the good bit of the story as fast as possible but the games very cleverly only ever show the first five chronological results forever you type in meaning they're trying to

skip to the big reveals just land you with a bunch of useless filler in order to find out the endgame details and the ultimate truth behind the game's plot players will need to actually watch the videos and work out specific search terms that will lead them to later

video files in this way the game forces you to understand and partially solve the mystery before you can progress and as an interesting side effect creates a nice narrative arc out of the disconnected footage because players will likely encounter clips in broadly the same order tangled Tower requires

players to assemble simple sentences using information and clues that they've gathered in order to prove that they've understood the connections between evidence and witness testimony it's technically possible to pre force these connections but between eight different bits of evidence to pair up and five options on the two

dialogue wheels you're looking at 1,400 possible combinations per solve and there are quite a few in the game meaning that it's usually quicker to actually try and solve a puzzle than it is to try and skip past this setup does have the nice side effect of allowing players

to progress if they've almost solved a given clue though because then they've only got a maximum of seven things to try a question some evidence a twist and then to solve but we're not done yet let's quickly take a look at how these ideas are combined in the

instant classic there is disco Elysium now this is a heavily story based game so there we'll be some spoilers but only for an early optional quest then I'd be on the first in game day so if you want to skip ahead that's fine just go to this timestamp

now for everyone else disco Elysium is a game all about playing as an amnesiac detective trying to solve the suspicious murder but I don't actually want to talk about that I want to talk about a side mystery you'll find which I've named the curse of the doomed commercial

area it's a working title so let's break down how de makes an interesting mystery in terms of those four steps first a question early on in your main adventure you'll be able to quiz this library owner about what's behind this spooky cousin it turns out that she thinks

the rundown building complex is haunted and it's sapping the life of a shop which is failing so badly that she's forcing her door to work instead of sending her to school surely there can actually be a ghost that seems to prey on capitalism right either way it's a

hell of a mystery and neatly ties into the surreal and political themes of the game next up evidence gathering you and your lovely best friend Kim explore the ruined commercial area finding more remains of rundown businesses like a gym a taxidermy place and what's clearly an RPG developer

over time by connecting the dots between bits of evidence like this planning board and a scary Polar Bear fridge you'll find out that all these businesses dreamed too big and ended up going broke third a twist it turns out that there's a hidden business still operating here a

novelty dice maker this reveal opens up a whole load of new questions and forces you to reevaluate why did her business survive is she the source the curse why does she stay hidden by answering these new questions chained to Kim and quizzing the dice maker you get to

form a complete opinion on the case before heading back to the library owner for the solve here you'll face with the question of not just why you think all these businesses seem to have failed but what kind of person you are is the dice maker really a demon

did these people all fail because they lost sight of true art TM are you a capitalist who thinks all these people had terrible businesses or were all these passion projects doomed to fail because of the oppressive bourgeoisie rule of a rash of all the important thing is that

the conclusion to this case is yours to draw and it feels incredibly satisfying to come to because it's the culmination of both your investigation into the world and also into your character by resolving this mystery and discovering a little more about what kind of person you are you

can uncover one more bit of evidence that can be used to solve the case of your missing identity something that won't be confirmed for sure until much later on in the game mysteries are of a heart of so many great stories and by not capitalizing on them video

games are missing out on the potential for some truly brewing experiences that test the players lateral thinking and analytical skills rather than the mathematical abilities or reaction speed sometimes a great game isn't the product of slick mechanics or loads of content but a purity of vision an understanding

of what makes particular kinds of narratives tick mystery stories are all about curiosity persistence and a desire to think outside the box both when it comes to designing them but also experiencing them too even though they might be paired to guests each other at the end of the

day players and designers of mystery stories need to collaborate to truly bring this vision to life and there's no better way to learn how than in 2019 s brilliant mystery games TL DW if you like the Sherlock TV show then you are officially banned from my channel look

I mean I don't make the rules that's just how it works you know sorry just get out get out hello what's up don't worry about just now you don't really have to go I was lying which coincidentally is exactly what Steven Moffat thinks a twist is anyway I'm

talking to you right now because I've got a few showers to make first for a cool up-and-coming YouTube person who you should be watching instead of me and then it's my top tier patrons the youtuber in question is none other than Tom Regan who does snappy fast-paced game

design inside videos with a little bit more of a comedic Ben's his stuff is a really great change of pace and it's been interesting to watch his style evolve and grow over the last year though it shown some love but the real stars you should be showered with

praise are my lovely patrons but especially my top tier $10 a month mysterious benefactors who are Alex to launch a siren on a 94 Baxter heel big chess Brian Atari Ani Calvin Han Daniel matches David Dumitrescu I hope I said that right sorry if I didn't duck jam

Karen bailed doodle hog Evie eyebath on Jessie Rhine Joshua binswanger Lieberman Lucas slack lunar Eagle 1996 mace window 54 max Phillip off missed the tea with some tea Patrick Romberg Phil be the bill be phony homeless Prospero Ray's dad Samuel Vander Plaats strategy in Ultima Yaron Mirren Zack

Schuester and chow who the list is getting longer and longer every month thank you for your continued support happy new year and I will see you around bye