The Murdered Official

A very well-written story that could have used a bit more polish and proofreading


Good:

1. The storytelling and writing quality was quite good overall. Main character details, like Leo's naps, fondness for the garden, and perspective on the women around him, allowed us to inhabit the protagonist effectively

2. The erotic parts were enjoyable but tasteful

3. Character and world design and building were done well. Unique characteristics, like the rare fat protagonist and Moonfalls-obsessed assistant, made the characters feel more realistic

4. There was a noticeable element of humor in the story, from the lazy options to Leo's humorous observations of his surroundings.


Bad:

1. A few non-tight details that didn't really add to the story, like Leo's repeated struggles with climbing the stairs and the King's bizarre unreasonableness, which contradicts earlier descriptions of the King as a competent ruler

2. Minor typos. Proofreading would have helped greatly.


Ugly:

1. Some of the non-main branches seemed to have received less attention

2. The tea room path felt jarringly strange. The true ending of the story seems to have been the witch's son killing Wanorn. Why, then, would the tea room lady bother killing me just for intruding on her tea room? It seemed a bit unreasonable. I mean, I'm the nephew of the king and an important court official forcrissakes. The overly severe consequences of investigating the tea room could have been explained away by the implied conspiracy with the queen to have Wanorn killed, but that plotline went nowhere with the true ending of the witch's son doing it.

3. Logical reasoning wasn't as rewarded by the story as much as I would have liked it to. Besides the obvious do your job/be lazy decisions, there wasn't much clues as to which choices would lead to a successful outcome to the case. For example, there was no indication that looking for information at the tea room would yield less useful outcomes than visiting the bank. For a detective murder mystery, I would have liked more opportunities to use deduction to pursue clues and figure out the culprit myself rather than random "go left/go right" choices.

Overall, the positives greatly outweighed the negatives, and reading the entire story made for an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

General Recommendation: I recommend this game; it’s a fun and engaging murder mystery game.
Preview: Can you, minister of justice for Rolkenstein, solve the murder of Warnorn Polquin, cousin to the king?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
This game is a very well-structured murder investigation. The cyoa format seems like it would lend itself very well to a murder mystery game—after all, much of the fun of these books is trying to solve the case yourself. However, anyone who’s actually tried to write one of these games will have discovered that you very quickly have to start making sacrifices, choosing whether to focus on player agency, options, the narrative, presenting clues, etc. Make the narrative too tight, and the players won’t feel like they really solved it. Make it too exploratory, and you give yourself a lot more work, plus the chance that players will feel aimless and unclear on where to take their investigation.
Setting this game up as a gauntlet-style adventure avoids many of these problems. The game is divided into “rounds” where the player either finds a clue, or they don’t. By making the clue-finding time-based rather than locaation based, the game allows for a more streamlined narrative, and avoids becoming too difficult or sprawling. The wide variety of investigative options the player can take prevents this from making the game too linear. It allows the game to be both wide and deep, giving it a lot of replay value even after the player has solved the case.
That said, this game does veer on the more narrative side of things. The case is solved depending on which links the player investigates, not whether or not the player has actually pieced things together in their head. This makes it a bit more story-like than game-like, and takes away from the value of close reading the text.
The game has an appropriate amount of red herrings, which are plausiable enough to hold attention, but not so much so that any of them seem more realistic than the actual solution.
It would have been amusing had Leo’s obesity actually mattered to the plot’s resolution in some way. But that’s not a complaint about the story as it exists, it just would have been funny if it had happened.
The one complaint I have is this game focuses almost entirely on who had a motive to kill Wanorn, not who was capable of it. We never even meet the killer until his identity is revealed, so there’s no way to check alibis or murder weapons, when with a real murder, doing so would be one of the most important parts of the investigation.
The solution to the game is satisfying, if not particularly complex. The killer’s motivations are comprehensible, if extreme, given what we’ve learned of his life situation.
In conclusion: A solid example of a murder mystery cyoa done well. It’s nice to see games taking advantage of the format to tell stories like this.

Specific notes:
-Ooh, very nice title page!
-I usually dislike intros that start off with a description of the setting, but this one works, I think. Not sure what about this makes it work, but it does. It frames the rest of the story well, establishing that this is taking place in a realtively peaceful setting.
-The lore surrounding King Anixar is interesting. Is the rhyming with annexor deliberate?
-Something about the tone of the introductory sequence to this work (including Leo’s introduction) reminds me in a good way of the kinds of books I used to read when I was younger.
-I like that it’s clear what the true purpose of clicking each link means. Some games of this genre try to “trick” the player into thinking a link means one thing when it really means another; this game does not go for that cheap tactic.
-I like the attention that is given to each scene, even the short ones, such as Leo’s attempt to get into the medical examiner’s office. As in linear mysteries, there’s a sense of the building of clues and the feeling that anything could potentially be important.
-The dynamic between the investigation team, Leo, Tom, and Caitlin, works well. They do a good job being there for Leo to bounce information off of, conveying through dialogue information that would otherwise have to be narrated.
-The gauntlet format works well for a murder mystery game, since it allows the player a realistically broad amount of options, while still keeping the narrative relatively streamlined.
-Reynald is well characterized through his dialogue, just the right amount of suspicious.
-Eiran’s swampy area is well-set with the details mentioned.
-Eiran walks the line between quaint and cliche. She can be seen as falling into the random old witch cliche character archetype, or as a tribute to that archetype.
-I like that the king refuses to take Leo’s BS about how the investigation is proceding. In a way, he’s speaking directly to the player here; this is a clear cut win-lose game, and you lost.
-Odd that Leo agrees Wanorn deserved to be murdered. Insulting and abandonning his estranged son was a dick move, but it doesn’t exactly excuse murder.
-Lol I got murdered for trying to enter a tea room. RIP.
-I like that the player can ‘solve’ the case with a conclusion that is clearly incorrect. It’s an option most games like this don’t give. I also like that in some cases it’s allowed to be a positive ending for Leo; he doesn’t care, he has staircases to worry about. The attention given to the dead ends in this game is excellent.

Grammar
All good!
Mastery of Language
Probably the game’s greatest weakness is the nitty-gritty details of the writing itself. This game could’ve used another editing round of tightening up the language. There is clever sentence structure in many places, but there are also several places where repeated words and clumsy structure breaks immersion, such as “A good life and a good quality of life.” It makes the text come across as a little overly verbose, taking more time to say things than needed. It veers on the side of “telling” rather than “showing”. Tightening up the sentence structure could probably be done with just another editing round focused on cutting out unnecessary words.
An example of what I mean: “Two kids were near the body, slowly creeping up on it, looking like they were afraid but also curious.” It’s clear from the first two clauses that the kids are afraid and curious, directly saying so makes the story needlessly wordy and drags the reader. The second half of the sentence could easily be cut to improve pacing.
Another example: “He looked like he was ready to run again.” His head shaking and dialogue already makes this clear, and describing him fidgeting or glancing around nervously would get the point across more smoothly.
Leo’s name gets said a lot in text. This is indicative of the fact that almost all his actions are tagged with “he/Leo did” or “he/Leo thought”, often at the beginning of sentences. Removing some of these tags, or just varying up the structure, could also speed up the pacing.

Player Options/fair choice
There are plenty of options, and it’s reasonably clear what the outcome of each one will be.

WRITING ADVICE:
I recommend coding in a mechanic for the player to actually make a guess at the end. It’s entirely possible to correctly solve the case and still get a “not enough information” ending. A mechanic of this kind would reward players for close reading, not for link clicking.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
I did not get a victory ending on my first readthrough, but I did have someone who I was pretty sure was the killer, and after finding the victory ending next, that guess turned out to be correct.

CONCLUSION: A solid 6/8. Better show-don’t-tell less-verbose narration and a mechanic for guessing the solution rather than having it solved for you would go a long way towards pushing it up to 7/8.

So I am a gigantic fan of Ogre's work. You have to know this going into my review. One of the things I like best about Ogre's stories is how they often have game-like elements. This story, while a straight-up story, feels to me game-like, like I'm playing Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but with fewer violins and cocaine.

"The answer is either Yes, you know who killed him; or No, you don’t know. That’s it."

That's a key sentence from the game, and something I love about it is that it's actually not necessarily true. This game let me play a lazy-ass investigator who put up posters and then pretty much did nothing else. At the end, maybe it was suicide for all I know. From the perspective of my investigator, it *was*--and that's really cool. I wondered if the story would let me blow off serious investigation, and yep, it sure did. And I was also hoping that it would let me leave with a half-baked conclusion and stroll away whistling and feeling satisfied with my work, and it sure did.

This story demands some serious attention and thought about the clues; the choices of what to pursue require that you have a theory of the case, and that you use your time wisely. Because this game will absolutely let you fritter away your time chasing dead ends, and the dead ends are some of my favorite parts. The writing was lively and funny, in that very particular Ogre way. It *reeked* of style and substance in practically every paragraph.

Not very many options with too much boring reading. To engage the readers more you could add side plots.

Quick summary: Good story, well written (in most places) and a well executed murder mystery.

***More details (SPOILERS)***
The story does a good job of setting up the environs of the country, and does a good job of blurring the timeline of the setting enough to make it difficult to know how advanced things are intended to be, but leaves enough window for magic to be a believable add in.

Leo is a good protagonist and using his corpulence as a reason to avoid having to do chase scenes or more physically active aspects of detecting. It gave him a very Hercule Poirot feel that was entertaining to follow along with. At least in the ending I found (I think the best one), it didn't feel like your fellow investigators really added much to the story other than being sounding boards for Leo.

One particular section really jumped out at me, the interview at the Bank. The way the banker spoke felt very odd and stilted to me as a reader, but wasn't noted on by Leo. Perhaps a little more exposition on his relationship with the banking brothers would address that.

There are also several areas, as noted by others, that the phrasing could be make more concise and less redundant.

Just figured out the combination of choices; I knew the answer, but some of the choices felt random at times.

HOW THE HELL DO YOU MAKE PROGRESS???

I can certainly relate to Leo. I am one lazy son of a bitch—which is why I always procrastinate on my context entries and either quit in the middle or do a last minute bs story to satisfy contest requirements. I'm pretty sure the choices I made saved me from a couple of red herrings, but perhaps if I would have went the other routes I would have arrived at the same result. Maybe if I played through a different path I'd have that question answered.

Positives: There was some decent humor scattered about, which helped to sweeten the adventure along the way. The writing was palatable. There were plenty of choices, and as far as murder mysteries go, it was fairly realistic (as much as fantasy can be). The descriptions and dialogue were pretty good as well.

The social structure and culture of the people were well established and grounded.

The motives and actions of the suspects you investigate seem reasonable and realistic. I won't post spoilers, but I like the nuance that certain characters could feel outrage toward the victim, but still not necessarily want to kill them. Many of these types of murder mysteries make suspects too simplistic. This storygame has some nice nuance for these characters.

Negatives:
The ending in the path I took did no seem entirely earned. More like 80% earned. While my character was aware of the bastard son, the case wasn't quite closed before he jumped up and confessed. At that point he certainly was a suspect, perhaps even the main suspect, but more detective work needed to be done. It was rather convenient that he finished the case for me by volunteering to proclaim his guilt.

Lastly, I would prefer the description of the lands and various nations to be given in dialogue in the context of the story, or character point of view descriptions, rather than a prologue of exposition describing the geography.


Overall:
As far as murder mysteries go, this one is alright. You have plenty of options to really exercise your critical thinking skills, and your role-playing chops, which is a plus. There are a few obvious comical moments, and a couple more subtle ones, which adds some good spice to the overall story.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in murder mysteries.