The star detectives always appear brilliant in the novels, but that’s because they’re noticing the things the author put in the story specifically for them to notice. This essentially is the exact same trick mystery novelists pulled in genre classics, but it feels dumb in games because it has to ruin the magic trick Bithell described by making everything important overtly important.
This of course is to keep the flow of the game moving, and to avoid the tedious random item-combining of adventure games, which is a problem that has plagued most prior Hercule Poirot games. These scenes have always felt a bit embarrassing to me, because they invariably give you a button to press that makes your “clues” light up like neon.
Arkham Asylum has Batman working out where Killer Croc’s hideout is, and in The Witcher 3, Geralt routinely has to analyze scenes of carnage to track down monsters.
In Assassin’s Creed Unity, a series of side-quests has Arno investigating murders in Paris. But think of the times we’re given the chance to become the detective, and it’s a series of disappointments, even when it’s an element in an otherwise successful game. This misdirection doesn’t work in videogames because when we’re playing games we want an active role in unraveling the mystery. We could depend on Hastings and Watson to ask the questions that prompted the detectives to reveal their brilliance. For Poirot, there was Captain Hastings, and for Holmes there was Dr. We’re never placed in the shoes of the master detective instead, the reader watches the master at work through the eyes of his long-suffering sidekick. It’s the same trick Conan Doyle used in his Sherlock stories. Clues are found, and it seems as though these are uncovered naturally through sleuthing-when really what’s happening is that everything we’re shown is relevant to the author’s design.īut one of the magic tricks Agatha Christie used to make her star detective come off as the consummate genius is one that doesn’t really work in videogames.
Through masterful writing and stage-setting, the reader is drawn into a believable world that feels chock full of potential suspects. “But in the audience’s mind, something incredible, impossible and impossibly real has occurred.”Ĭlassic mystery novels are magic tricks too, in some of the same key ways. “An incredibly mundane reality exists, a finessed sequence of hand gestures, trap doors and misdirection,” Bithell wrote. Writing about Shadow of Mordor, Mike Bithell (creator of Thomas Was Alone and Volume) said games are essentially magic tricks. It was always exciting to read as Poirot explained, in the denouement of each book, who the murderer was and how they’d done it. Poirot was an obsessive through and through, from the points of his waxed mustaches and starched shirt collars to his analysis of each case he took on. I devoured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s genre-defining Sherlock Holmes tales, but Agatha Christie’s fussy little Belgian super-detective Hercule Poirot would quickly become my favorite. IO Interactive’s Hitman (2016) isn’t a detective game, but playing it now reminds me of the classic mystery stories I read years ago. It was while I was hurling yet another pipe wrench at the back of a security guard’s unsuspecting skull that I had the thought, “Why aren’t there any good detective games?”