Mystery

I love the visual look of Dirty Split, which looks as if designed by Shag (and as if the title screens were by Saul Bass). The game itself is a conventional point-and-click graphic adventure (built using the Wintermute engine); the protagonist is a Joe Friday sound-alike private eye, hired by an heiress whose son has been accused of murder.

It's not a long game -- experienced adventure gamers should be able to complete it in two or three hours -- but it's enjoyable enough for its duration. The puzzles are not too obscure (except for the last one, which is kind of ridiculous, and I got only through the time-honored technique of "use everything with everything"), and there is a walkthrough, should you get stuck.

Dirty Split reaches for, but doesn't quite achieve, the wit of the Lucasarts adventures; the voice acting varies from the pretty good (the protagonist) to the embarassingly hammy, but is reasonably professional (not a forgone conclusion, given that the developers are German -- there's a German language version too, for those who speak it). There are also occasional English infelicities (one is despairing, not despaired; people with Noo Yawk accents do not pronounce the 't' in 'often'). But they are minor, and not excessively jarring.

It's perhaps not quite at, say, Dave Gilbert's level -- but not a bad little adventure game, either.

East Side Story is a point-and-click mystery in the Tex Murphy mold (at least until that series got moldy), developed by Mikael and Eleen Nyqvist, a Swedish husband-and-wife team -- their fourth game, in fact, featuring the English sleuth Carol Reed. It's first person, meaning that, like Myst, you never see your protagonist onscreen; and like Myst, screens are static images, with hotpoints you can mouse over, and the ability to turn to either side and move forward or back.

The images, however, are not rendered 3D, but photography -- nicely captured photographs of the town of Norrköping, in Sweden. This has its good side and its bad; the photographs are technically excellent, and many of them very attractive, providing visual quality that would be hard (and expensive) to create with digital assets.

It starts with the dinner; several people are sitting around the table, represented as multicolored shapes -- squares, diamonds, circles. You tab through the up and down keys, cycling through them, learning their names, getting aquainted. Then you play with the left and right keys, moving through time. Two people leave, then another, then the dining room is empty, and the narrative unfolds. Daisy discovers the body in the study.

The Act of Misdirection is a short horror story. There are some interactions that might be called puzzles, but they don't feel like it -- at least, not in the conventional sense. Instead, the interaction feels like an improv routine, in which the game hints gently (and then more explicitly) at the player's role, and the player performs on cue.

An Act of Murder is a classic country-house mystery: an isolated estate, a small group of suspects, a limited amount of time to solve the crime.

The country-house mystery premise has been done numerous times in interactive fiction: consider Infocom's Deadline, or Sierra's Mystery House. Even in the best of these, though, the game-play almost always fails to capture what's essential about detective fiction. Even at their best, mystery IF games usually test the player's thoroughness (have you looked under every bed? analyzed every object?) and patience in replaying (have you tried spying on all the characters at all the available times of day?), rather than his logical thinking and deductive abilities.

An Act of Murder stands out because it does ask the player to focus on drawing conclusions: what do you know? What do you need to find out next? What do these alibis mean? There are a few objects to discover, a few pieces of evidence that have to be searched for, but for the most part, Act of Murder is about the conclusions you draw, and how you figure out where to look next.