Now that is a difficult genre. Here we have Ghorpm providing them for us (you said you had also been designing some outside of these forums, Ghorpm ?), but generally speaking they are rare, and very limited. For good reasons. : they are very open-ended, and they demand to create a setting with some elements that are deliberately a bit off... which means all the rest has to be perfectly right. Players must make the difference between unvoluntary bugs, and actual mistakes or oddities left by a murderer who didn't conceal his crime perfectly. In this re-creation, any little logical or even graphic mistake can ruin the game.

But playing sleuth is fun. And several games attempt to put us in the shoes of a crime investigator. They are a sub-category of adventure games, and unfortunately they are not always very specific, because of these limitations. Take the Sherlock Holmes games. The first (atrocious) one, Mystery of the Mummy, was just a point and click exploration game in some egyptian resident evil mansion. The story told you that you were a detective, and so you used your lens a lot. But you didn't do anything different than any point and click Indiana Jones in any kind of weird crypt. Same with The Awakened (don't get me started on the intrusion of the supernatural in Holmes stories), and with Post Mortem : investigating meant using object on object. Mortevielle's Manor was more... less... okay, I never understood what Mortevielle Manor was. And of course, there is the current trend of "hidden objects" games, that often present themselves as crime investigation. Hardly worth mentionning.

The Case of the Silver Earring made things differently. While point and click at the roots, a large part was dedicated to answering lists of questions about the story protagonists, points that you had to deduce from bits of interviews. This happened at the end of every chapter. But only at the end of the game, in Colonel's Bequest, even though that game offered a great sense of sleuthing. In-between, there were games such as Cruise for a Corpse. Was it about deduction, or about being at the right time at the right place ? It did end with questions, though. And so did Sierra's Manhunter series, where your deductions are helped by alien technology and dictatorial satellite tracking of human movements, but you still had to enter a culprit's name at the end of each day.

There are a lot of such games I haven't played, old and news. It's a genre that I distrust, but always hope to see done right, which may be a logical impossibility. So, I ask the question, under that perspective. What investigation games have you played, and found that they were doing things right. That they were actually making you guessing about murderer identities (instead of letting you solve unrelated puzzles until the cut-scene reveal). What gaming mechanics best emulated such kind of mysteries, and thought processes ?

Optionally, anyone on GoG ?

Edit :
Forgot to mention the clever Blackwell series, a point and click adventure game that lets you combine "infos" instead of objects...

Great topic, sir!:)

Many years ago, there was a quite impressive attempt at the genre called "The Detective Game" for the Commodore 64, the objective was to find 10 pieces of evidence [most of them being labeled as such] and point out the killer before a certain hour, at which the game ended. While i haven't played it in a while, it would be hard for me to judge the game right, due to it being one of the most important games that shaped my gaming taste. Though, i encourage You to check it out.

Another game i'd like to point out is La Abadía del Crimen/The Abbey Of Crime which is very simillar to The Great Escape [the isometric view, the 'roll calls']. The game was remade some time ago for the PC, so it might also be worth checking out, though the gameplay is quite dated.

I used to create a lot of them several years ago but they were quite different. It was actually more like a RPG game. The story was more obscure but players were supposed to take an active part in investigation: they were questioning suspects themselves, asking for a detailed analysis (e.g. fingerprints) and so one. It usually took about ten hours to solve the case and we played that in real life not via any forum/chat.

I also created several cases like those I publish here, polish speaking people may find them on some forums although I think I've never posted them personally (my friends did it).

But those I give to you are exclusive. They are 100% created for GOG community. Yeah, and I will add one more thing: each of us is completely different. What's obvious for me is not so obvious for someone else. What I find to be reasonable is considered to be far-fetched for someone else. And I think we simply have to accept it. It's very, very difficult to create a (not so easy) crime mystery that would satisfy everybody. And those which are undisputed are usually quite easy (e.g. famous mail delivery on Sunday - I've seen it half a dozen times in different riddles) Creating as well! :D As I wrote in PM to you: I always hope that solving my riddles is at least as much fun for you as it is for me when I create them I think that's the only game you mentioned that I've actually played. What can I say? Well, I did enjoyed it, that's for sure. But the structure of the game is not perfect. It resembles books of Arthur Conan Doyle... too much Shocking, isn't it? Let me explain: in books Holmes was always making a lot of observations and deductions that the reader was not aware of. In the end of the story the detective finally explained everything. And it's perfect for a book but it's not what I expect from the game. I would like to follow the story from the beginning to the end. I will give you a small example (it is NOT a spoiler): the actual proof whether Lavinia is guilty or not is is very obscure. You can see it as a player but it's never anyhow recorded in Sherlock's notebook. He reveals it in his final speech at the end of the game. I'm feeling proud because I understood that before seeing the ending sequence. There were several other points like this. As far as I remember I got at least half of them so I was very proud indeed ;) But my point is that it's not what I expect from the game. I would like to know what I'm doing and why. But I also agree with you Telika, that the questions section at the end of each chapter was a very good idea indeed.

The game I really enjoyed was "The lost files of Sherlock Holmes: The case of the Serrated Scalpel". That's one of the best games I've ever played, perhaps even the very best one. Even though the story was as obscure (or even more) as the one in silver earring you could actually follow it step by step. At the end there was a small summary of all events but there was nothing new there (as opposite to the silver earring). And the game was mostly based on observations/deductions and conversations. The command "look" was the most useful one! And it was perfect this way. Everything was very logical. After you have seen something new you immediately knew that you had to come back to somebody and ask for it. And what I find really exceptional is the fact that despite many locations (specially at the end of the game) you could somehow always know which are already done (and therefore no need to come back there). I've never seen it as clear as in this game. I played that one too but alas my English was not very good at the time and I used some walkthrough to finish the game. Perhaps I should come back to it...

Nor was mine, that game introduced me to a neat book called "a dictionary", it encouraged me to make notes and research words. I miss that metagaming [?] in games. I never had the chance to see a walkthrough to the game back in the day. Was there one?

The only sleuthing game I've played was Murder! on the Amiga (it was also released for Atari ST and DOS). I found the game excellent for what it was. You had to interview suspects to determine motives and alibis, examine possible murder weapons for fingerprints, etc. The NPCs would move around, talk to each other, and pick up objects or drop them.

Graphically, the game was interesting too. I was an isometric game, and while the GUI was in color, the levels and images were kept in black & white (well, greyscale), to maintain an atmosphere of the classic old whodunnit movies.

When the Sherlock Holmes games were mentioned, I thought at first you were talking about Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (1991, for DOS).

There's also the two Laura Bow adventures, The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra. I'm surprised that they aren't on here yet, but I imagine they'll make their way here eventually, maybe even as a bundle.

You will be surprised I guess ;) I found one on... teletext. Yup, the crappy Internet substitute that you can find on your TV. But it was quite popular in 90s, wasn't it?

I've played a bit of Law and Order Legacies by Telltale Games (got it with the Almost Everything pack), but from what I've seen I didn't like the gameplay at all.

That one isn't really a point-and-click adventure, It's like a sleuth story ported 1:1 to videogame. You watch the characters talk, you ask the witnesses a few questions and then the game asks you whether you believe them or not and why (with multiple choice options). There is litle interaction beside that, apart from the occasional hidden object game, it's strictly linear and I didn't think it was fun at all to guess which of 3 or 4 multiple choice options was the right deduction, just to be applauded when I found it or watch the scene another time and try again if I was wrong (the game immediately tells you that, like: No, you were wrong, you can try again if you want to). I felt like they were kidding me.

I have to admit I don't really like sleuth riddles and I'm not that interested in guessing games about who's the murderer, but I still think you could make a better effort in porting them to the PC. I found the the hand-holding and linearity of the game really spoilt the fun.

Thanks for the warning. I'll avoid this game. It sounds horrible! I think it's very difficult. That's why (as I described above) my friends and me used to play something which may be called RPG sleuth game. Players usually have so many great ideas how to question the suspects that it's difficult to predict. In computer games everything is predefined while playing with your friend open up numerous opportunities...