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What Makes a Good Detective Game? | Game Maker's Toolkit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwV_mA2cv_0

Note! This video contains puzzle spoilers for Life is Strange, The Shivah, and Discworld Noir.

Detective video games promise to turn us into Sherlock Holmes - but why do so many of them bungle the execution? In this video I mine ancient DOS games, forgotten mobile apps, quirky indie titles, and games that aren’t even about solving crimes, for good murder mystery mechanics.

Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance)

LA Noire (Team Bondi, 2011)
KGB (Cryo Interactive, 1992)
Assassin's Creed Syndicate (Ubisoft Quebec, 2015)
Murdered: Soul Suspect (Airtight Games, 2014)
Kona (Parabole, 2016)
The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief (King Art Games, 2013)
Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter (Frogwares, 2016)
Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010)
Police Quest: Open Season (Sierra Entertainment, 1993)
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments (Frogwares, 2014)
Batman: Arkham Knight (Rocksteady Studios, 2015)
Condemned: Criminal Origins (Monolith Productions, 2005)
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Eidos Montreal, 2016)
The Wolf Among Us (Telltale Games, 2013)
Layton Brothers: Mystery Room (Level-5, 2012)
Detective Grimoire (SFB Games, 2014)
The Trace (Relentless Software, 2015)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations (Capcom, 2004)
Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment, 2015)
Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders (Artefacts Studio, 2016)
Contradiction: Spot the Liar! (Tim Follin, 2015)
Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013)
Discworld Noir (Perfect Entertainment, 1999)
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (Capcom, 2009)
The Shivah (Wadjet Eye Games, 2006)
Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015)
Blackwell Convergence (Wadjet Eye Games, 2009)
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (ICOM Simulations, 1991)
Eagle Eye Mysteries (Stormfront Studios, 1993)
Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, Unreleased)
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014)
Splatoon 2 (Nintendo, 2017)
Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios, 2015)
Sonic Mania (Sega, 2017)
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (Naughty Dog, 2017)
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze Studios, 2013)

Mark Brown does excellent work. Give it a watch.
 
A very good watch, that (as always from Mark Brown).

Even as someone who enjoyed the likes of LA Noire and the Sherlock games, they were by no means perfect as pointed out, and hopefully we see better "proper" detective games in the future.
 
This was a great video. Now I really want a game that combines all those best elements and design choices he talks about

Guess I need to play Contradiction
 
Westerado does something neat for accusing suspects. Game is all about finding a killer and each quest gives you additional information on how to identify them. But you can accuse anyone in the game with your incomplete information, which can get you in trouble.
 

Tizoc

Member
I think have maybe half those games.
I can't watch this until I play them ToT

Who owns the rights to the Discworld games? Cuz they really need to be re-released.
 
Glad to see The Blackwell series get called out. It's so so so good.

Still need to play The Shivah, going back to it after playing Blackwell is a bit rough. Dave Gilbert found his writing/designing legs a bit after The Shivah. How Long To Beat clocks it at an hour and a half so I guess I know what I'll be doing later today.
 

xviper

Member
does The witcher 3 count as part detective game ?? loved the Witcher contract quests and they had lots of investigations

if not, LA noire is the king of detective games
 
Was glad to see both Ace Attorney and Her Story crop up.

The latter especially honestly had one of the most engrossing experiences of deduction I've ever felt in a game, particularly when I stopped and thought about why I'd picked up on certain clues. Like realising I picked up on 'blonde' because of stereotypes.
 

peakish

Member
That's one of the best videos Mark has put up, although as someone who's always looking forward to a mystery I'm a bit biased. I share a lot of his complaints about most detective games. It rarely feels like you're a detective in them. And for me as for him, Her Story felt like the sort of game I'd always been looking for: no gamey rules or a neat short list of clues to pick from, just a database which has to be solved by you listening, watching and reasoning about information presented to you.

I'll have to check out a few of the games he mention. I've stayed clear of the Blackwell series but if they have more puzzles like The Shivah I'll have to play them. And I'm totally waiting for a larger budget 3D game to get it right, too, sometime.
 
The best gaming-related channel in Youtube.

Also, I agree with Mark: Her Story is the best detective game I've ever played.
 
Damn right, Her Story is the best detective game!

Giving you all the agency to make connections through the search engine makes it so much more satisfying.

This reminded me it's been a while since I've heard anything from Return Of The Obra Dinn. Oh the Tigsource forum has got updates. Can't wait.
 

Kinyou

Member
I believe he's totally right that only those few games capture the real idea of being a detective but he also always mentions how little help the player gets from those games and I imagine therein lies the problem. If you want to make a game for a mass market you don't want players to get stuck at puzzles and when even guessing is impossible many might just drop the game altogether. That's probably why only rather lowbudget games risk this approach and not something like a LA Noir or Batman Arkham Knight.
 
Is his channel the best videogame channel? Fucking love GMT.
He's the closest thing to an "Every Frame A Painting" or Nerdwriter for games. We need more channels like his

GMTK for game design, ACG for reviews are really the only game channels I frequent. I also like AI and Games, which focuses on discussing AI in specific games and general AI design
 
I always thought of that Ace Attorney is more of puzzle game than a detective game. Discovering contractions relies on the players attentiveness to the dialog, more so than piecing together a case from nothing. But I guess the detective genre is about solving puzzles?
 
I always thought of that Ace Attorney is more of puzzle game than a detective game. Discovering contractions relies on the players attentiveness to the dialog, more so than piecing together a case from nothing. But I guess the detective genre is about solving puzzles?

If at the end of the day the fundamental point of the game is 'Whodunnit?', then it is a detective game. Given Ace Attorney's logic for getting your defendant a verdict of innocent is (mostly) by way of proving who the real criminal is, and much of your time is spent scrounging around crime scenes for evidence, and talking to people for testimony, it counts.

So yes, the detective genre is largely puzzle solving (the puzzle generally being the crime).
 
Good video, but my question at the end is if you take away any amount of direction, do you just alienate and frustrate your audience?

The audience that wants more games like Her Story has to be super niche.

I know this goes into those completion percentage discussions, but is a game design good if it challenges 5% of your audience and frustrates the rest?
 
He's the closes thing to an "Every Frame A Painting" or Nerdwriter for games. We need more channels like his

GMTK for game design, ACG for reviews are really the only game channel I frequent. I also like AI and Games, which focuses on discussing AI in specific games and general AI design

GMTK, EFAP and CaptainKristian are THE channels that when I see they uploaded a new video I have to watch it, no matter how tired I am. Love their voices and video editing.

GMTK is as far from EFaP as it can possibly be.

Mark Brown actually uploads more than a single video per millenium.

I thought that with Patreon he'd upload videos faster, but reality isn't that nice.
 
Good video, but my question at the end is if you take away any amount of direction, do you just alienate and frustrate your audience?

The audience that wants more games like Her Story has to be super niche.
Most definitely. That's why you wouldn't make it a game for everyone, it would be very niche much like Her Story.
 
Should I watch Mystic River? I don't care about Kevin Beacon, but I like Laurence Fishburne, but from the clips he just seems like the sidekick.
 
I always thought of that Ace Attorney is more of puzzle game than a detective game. Discovering contractions relies on the players attentiveness to the dialog, more so than piecing together a case from nothing. But I guess the detective genre is about solving puzzles?

well, pretty much like any sherlock holmes story, you basically assemble all your evidence, & use it while questioning those involved to detect contradictions & come to conclusions. so, yeah, each case's a 'puzzle', & it's solution is determining 'who dunnit?' :) ...

of all the mystery/detective games i've played, the ace attorney games have, for me, been the most consistently high-quality/satisfying. the fact that they're extremely funny, as well, is pretty amazing...
 

PsionBolt

Member
Her Story is absolutely the best detective game I've played, so full marks there. The praise for Contradiction, Ace Attorney, Blackwell, and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective was also great to see. I expected to see The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker show up at some point; oh well.

Towards the end, when he was discussing ways to have the player demonstrate their overall understanding of the case, I was expecting a mention of Danganronpa's Climax Logic. It's similar to the timeline stuff he mentions, but more complex, as you not only have to identify when things happened, but also what happened and to whom. It's a bit too directed some of the time (it gives both questions and multiple-choice answers, though you do have a whole bunch to sift through), but I think it worked quite well overall.

Good video, but my question at the end is if you take away any amount of direction, do you just alienate and frustrate your audience?

The audience that wants more games like Her Story has to be super niche.

I know this goes into those completion percentage discussions, but is a game design good if it challenges 5% of your audience and frustrates the rest?

This is a major challenge from the developer's point of view, for sure. But to look at it from magical christmas land where no one needs to work to eat, I don't think that limited appeal is necessarily a bad thing -- plenty of the world's greatest art is of extremely limited interest to the general population. Even for folks who are way into art, most are only into a limited range of the arts. That's why, when making aesthetic judgements, I think it's best to ignore the issue of mass appeal, and embrace the complete subjectivity inherent in taste.

Mark Brown definitely approaches his videos this way, and in so doing, he produces some of the internet's best game criticism. Devs that produced games the same way might starve, but they'd probably make great games in the process!
 
Should I watch Mystic River? I don't care about Kevin Beacon, but I like Laurence Fishburne, but from the clips he just seems like the sidekick.

Actually the movie is mostly about Bacon, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. It is an amazing movie and I'm not even a huge fan of detective movies; the murder case is only half of the movie's plot, if that. You should really watch it.
 

Riposte

Member
One thing that sets apart Ace Attorney (and games like it) from other more complex, open-ended detective games is that there's a stronger component of tension. You are not just finding stuff out, you are trying to save your client in a fairly desperate situation, and this feeling is communicated with a punishment system (in addition to how it limits guessing, as said in the video). That tension is completely diminished (and you can guess away) if you use/abuse save and quit as saves (or don't refuse the features built into the recent games), which I think is how most people play them.

I would say AA is more of an "adventure" game, because it follows pretty close to model of point and click adventure games (exploring, collecting clues, etc. is a sequence of interconnected problems to solve rather than separate examples of a mechanic).
 
Cool video, as expected from Brown.
Showcased a number of neat mechanics I'd never seen as well as highlighting games I should probably tackle.

But it brought back my game groups (loving) gripes with the Sherlock Holmes consulting detective board game, damn it Sherlock, you just always knew where to go from the start, how are we ever supposed to beat your score huh?!
 
I'll give it a watch, but how are there no Broken Sword games in the list?!
I never saw the Broken Sword games to be about detective work. You find out clues and figure out puzzles, but it's not like you're usually doing the other steps as shown in the video. Still some of my favourites, though!
 

NathanS

Member
Nothing on any of the Carmen games? Well their dependence on real world facts at the time of their making does hinder them coming back to them and entire countries have changed the set up of giving you free reign to put the clues together yourself and letting you get them wrong make them the finest detective games ever made in my book.

Any discussion of detective games without them is like an in-depth look at platformers that acts like Donkey Kong and Super Mario never existed.
 
Just finished watching this. I love Mark has gotten to the point where when he chooses to tackle a certain genre or style of game, he looks it at from what feels like every possible relevant interpretation - here we see L.A. Noire, the Telltale games, Wadjet Eye, old FMV mysteries, new FMV mysteries, detective sidequest crap in AAA games, stuff I've never heard of, and of course the grandaddy of them all Ace Attorey. The idea that plenty of them have gotten things right, just not everything at once (besides possibly Wadjet Eye, whose games I really need to play more of) is fascinating, I think Mark's at his best when he's uncovering major design challenges, what makes them some tricky, and offering a number of possible paths to success.

This was up there with his Soulslike video for me. Bonus points for the use of Last Window music.
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Ace Attorney, hands down, does the best job with the "piecing together the clues into an ah-ha moment" which is the hardest thing to pull off
 

2+2=5

The Amiga Brotherhood
Unlike the rest of you i find this video disappointing, usually GMT deeply analizes game mechanics and tells why they work or why they don't, what are all the consequences of a design choice, why all games should have some feature and so on, this video on the other hand sounds more like a wishlist, it's nice to want things but there's a reason why big games don't leave everything in the hand of players, they need to appeal to a wide audience hence those games can't be too obscure and complex, honestly i was expecting from the video some kind of solution or compromise.

When i watch GMT videos i always learn something new and sometimes my mind is blown too, but nothing said in the video sounded to me particulary new or smart or whatever unlike all the other videos,

One last thing there's the big omission of Danganronpa games(in V3 not only you expose lies but you can lie too! Also the so hated minigames are the abstraction of the main character's process of deduction, something no other games do, we can discuss about minigames quality but not about the idea itself) and Carmen Sandiego games(too geography focused but cases' solution usually rely on player's intuition and knowledge, there isn't much hand holding).

I'm grateful to the video though because now i have a big ist of games to keep an eye on lol.
 
Ace Attorney, hands down, does the best job with the "piecing together the clues into an ah-ha moment" which is the hardest thing to pull off

I think part of it this is that with the framing of the the court case, almost every time you press a statement, or present a piece of evidence, you move the case along with that particular train of thought, which doesn't necessarily solve a relevant answer. It's possible to get as swept up in that as much as the characters do, until at last the prosecution or witness will ask,
"Okay, but what does that have to do with the case?"
Which prompts you to think about what exactly all that new information you just gathered might possibly mean. This is where Phoenix or Apollo regularly blow the doors wide open on a case, turning those seemingly curious but 'useless' factoids into the most vital evidence that re-contextualise, at times, the very nature of the crime itself.
 

Antiwhippy

the holder of the trombone
Does danganronpa not count?

I actually really like the way the truth bullet system is used to handle cases.
 
I don't find any detective game particularly compelling if you can't fuck up your final guess. It's like the main thing games as interactive narratives can do over traditional formats. If I just follow some sort of shitty detective vision markers, then it's bullshit.

It's like they always rob the climax of the genre from the player: putting all facts together to the best of my abilities and form a thesis who the killer is. Hell, I'd dare the game not TO reveal to you if you actually managed to fuck up, maybe only years down the line in-game world. Not knowing for sure is what can really elevate it forward, I think. You can't do it with fail states, otherwise people will just proceed with trial & error.
 
This was a great video. Now I really want a game that combines all those best elements and design choices he talks about

Guess I need to play Contradiction

The giant bomb playthrough of Contradiction is a really great watch, if you're into that kind of thing.

No Danganronpa :eek:
 

lazygecko

Member
We're not going to see stuff like this in big budget, AAA titles with detective/crime angles simply because they are mainly designed as power fantasy outlets. The entire "detective vision" mechanic in the Arkham games is pretty much a microcosm of this.
 

Squire

Banned
Should I watch Mystic River? I don't care about Kevin Beacon, but I like Laurence Fishburne, but from the clips he just seems like the sidekick.

He's a supporting actor, but that movie does own lol

Also see Gone Baby Gone. Based on a book by the same author as MR and very good.
 
Great video. I'd already played a lot of those games (totally agree with his sentiments about Her Story and the Blackwell series, The Shivah and other Wadjet Eye adventure games), but I have a few more to add to my list now.
 
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