Murder Most Foul
A Murder Most Foul!
On a dark night, in a lonely old mansion, there has been a murder!
You play the part of the tenacious detective who will scour the mansion for clues and bring the murderer to justice. The game procedurally generates a murder mystery for each game, so each case is different.
Wander around the mansion using the arrow keys. Bump into things to investigate them or to interrogate witnesses. If you need help, press "I" to use your intuition and highlight areas that might need more inspection.
Press "Tab" to switch between the map view, your notebook, and your "mind castle". Your notebook lists all the clues you have found, and your mind castle is a grid of suspects, weapons, motives, and murder locations which you can use to keep track of your deductions.
When you think you have a clear picture of what happened that night, go see the inspector and make your accusation! Will you identify the killer, or will they escape justice? It's all up to you.
This game was submitted as an entry to the 2023 Seven-Day-Roguelike game jam. It was created in seven days.
- Version 3 – Fixes some room-change messaging and a clue-blocking witness placement.
- Version 2 – Fixes some mystery generation predictability.
- Version 1 – Initial release.
Development log
- "Murder Most Foul" releasedMar 13, 2023
Comments
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I found a curtain rod in the oleander room but for some reason the notebook says it was found in the kitchen
Thanks for letting me know. I've tried to reproduce this and haven't yet, but I'll look into it further.
Impressive and intriguing.
Glad you like it!
Love the game. That's one fewer game on my queue that I need to make! :D Just 2 random comments:
1) when you enter the conservatory it says "Entry Hall?" (I think this happens if you enter from a particular place)
2) You can get into a situation where a suspect physically blocks a place with a clue
Keep creating!
I've uploaded a new version that should address both those issues. Thanks for taking the time to bring them to my attention!
Glad you enjoy the game - thanks for playing!
It don’t work for me :(
What browser are you using? Any error messages in the Javascript console window?
I tryied today again and now it works :) Last time I just go violet background in browser.
Okay, glad you got it working.
I definitely like this game. It's a logic puzzle in murder mystery trappings, and stuff like this is right up my alley! I have trouble making all the connections in a 6-suspect case, but that 'aha' moment is well worth it.
Glad you like the game. Thanks for playing!
I swear there are times where the procedural generation fucks you over and doesn't give you enough info
I worked pretty hard to try to make sure that doesn't happen, but it's a complex generator and bugs do happen. If you believe you've encountered a bad generator, you can send me the clues and I'll review them (make sure you found them all though - see below for how to do that).
Not sure how familiar you are with puzzles like this, but there are a couple of tricky clue types to watch out for that give more information than they seem. For instance, if it says that Eustace was neither the person with the straight razor nor the person in the master bedroom, you know three things, not two things:
A lot of people miss that third deduction, but it will be key to solving the mystery.
Similarly, the clue that shows a photo with a bunch of people, some named, some with a weapon, some being in a room, or some with a motive, can be a gold mine of deductions, but you have to go through all the individual pairings to make notes that each person is distinct. It can be easy to miss a pairing, so doing it methodically helps.
And I personally still struggle with using the grid itself to do the deductions. When I have checkmarks that line up, it's easy, but I always have to double-check my logic when I use the grid to discover more cross-outs. It's easy to miss opportunities to cross out cells from grid deductions!
Finally, you can visit the inspector on the front porch to find out whether you've found all the clues in the mansion. If you're missing something, he'll give you a suggestion where to look. And he's always got one last clue to give you which only comes to light once you find all the other clues – the one that determines the murder weapon from the lab.
Anyway, thanks for playing. Hope this helps.
He's supposed to give you one more clue? Odd he hasn't been doing that for me even when I got all the clues, not sure if that's a bug or I'm just not noticing
It would be impossible (outside of lucky guesswork) to solve the mystery without the clue he gives you, because you fill out the grid with everything to figure out who was in which room with which weapon with which motive, but none of them implicate the murderer until you get the lab results saying which weapon actually killed the victim – that's the last clue he gives you.
Note that he doesn't give you the clue until you've found all the other clues.
If you have other clues to find, he should say he's still waiting on the lab results and suggests you go look in the mansion some more.
“A is neither B nor C” alone doesn’t imply that B isn’t C. Inequality is NOT transitive.
I guess in other games you can make that deduction from the context, but in this game, the player generally isn’t told how the clue suggests that “A is neither B nor C”.
In my example, “I found curious details in a painting that suggests that whoever was desperate to hide a murder was neither Mrs. Salome Vile nor the person who had the scalpel.” doesn’t make clear that the painting presents these as three different people. Instead it’s just another randomly generated clue where I’m given the detectives conclusion, but not the details of how this conclusion was made.
You need to either explicitly tell the player the full conclusion, namely “A, B and C are three different people”, or make the context more explicit.
Suggestion: If your accusation is wrong it should tell you what was wrong about it, I had to give up because an accusation I was so confident in was wrong and I couldn't figure out what
Yeah, that would have been a good addition. It didn't make it into the game in the seven days (this was a game jam entry), but maybe I could add that with a future update. Great suggestion.
I love it, but there needs to be a way to move the mind castle, as I cannot see the bottom two rows on tangled mode
Sorry you’re having trouble. I’m not sure what you mean by “on tangled mode”, can you elaborate?
In the mean time you can try reducing the font size in your browser using the standard font size controls to see if it can resize things to fit for you.
I don't seem to be able to access any of the settings you mentioned in the game. As for tangled mode I'm referring to the hardest difficulty, with 6 suspects
Ah, sorry. Thanks for clarifying.
The settings I'm referring to aren't game settings, they're browser settings. Like, most browsers have keyboard and menu commands you can use to "zoom" text in and out. Since the mind castle is rendered with HTML, "zooming" the text will allow more of it to be displayed in your browser window.
This worked thank you
This is such an awesome game! It's such a great idea and very well executed. It is actually probably my favourite game I've discovered on this platform.
but...
* if you don't want the game ruined for you please stop reading now! *
I have played it enough to notice the pattern that tells you exactly who the killer is, their location at the time of the murder and their weapon, so that all you need to figure out is their motive.
The killer is almost always the left most suspect on the mind map, and their weapon and location is almost always the top left box of their respective sections on the mind map. Additionally, when you make an accusation, the killer, weapon and location is almost always the top of the list.
Even knowing this, it's still super fun to fill in the mind map and find all the clues. I Love games that change every time you play, it's one of the reasons I love this game, but this consistent pattern kind of detracts from that.
Glad you like the game, and thanks for taking the time to say so! Made my day.
As for the predictability of the solution, I think you may simply be running up against the vagaries of the RNG. It should be randomizing the positions, but just to check on your report, I played a 3-suspect mystery over lunch today, and only the motive was in the first slot in the mind map for that game; the other three aspects were in the second and third slots.
So while it doesn't mean that there's not something else that might be causing it, I wasn't able to reproduce the issue you described on my end. I'll give it a few more goes tonight, just to dig in a little more, but on the surface anyway, it seems to be successfully randomizing the positions.
How many suspects do you use when you play? In a three-suspect game, you'd expect fully a third of the time for the correct element to be first, so it's not super unlikely that the RNG could spit out a stretch of consecutive games with the mind map positions of the solution being fairly similar.
oh wow sorry I'm late with the reply! Maybe it is just RNG but I swear it happens pretty often on my end. I usually play with 5 or 6 suspects. Honestly thanks for the reply and checking out the issue, even if it's actually non-existent lol.
I've just started playing again because semester 2 at uni has started and this is my go-to game for study breaks and there's no way it's RNG. The murderer is always the left most name on the mind map which is also the first name on the list when you make an accusation. The murder weapon and location is always the top left of their respective grids on the mind map. The only thing that appears to be randomizing is the motivation.
Okay, I went into the game, and I think I know what happened. There's an inconsistency in the way different browsers handle the sort() functionality of arrays, apparently, which was causing problems with displaying the cohorts based on their names as opposed to their mystery status. That might explain why I saw it working on my end but you were seeing issues – the sort was working for me but not for you.
I've gone in and updated the sort functions to a format that should work more universally.
So, try it now! (You might need to clear your cache.) And thanks for letting me know twice!
It's fixed! Thank you so much I really appreciate you taking the time to do this! It's a great game so I'm very excited to be able to enjoy it at it's best again.
Nice, glad to hear it's fixed. Thanks for taking the time to bring it to my attention and go back and forth on it. It was a little elusive since I wasn't initially able to replicate it on my end - those are always the toughest bugs to fix!
This is wonderful! Amazing job. Great idea and execution.
Gameplay video of your game.
looks great, did you do the art from scratch?
Yeah, it's a custom tileset I made that's 13x26 in size. Kind of a weird tileset size, but it worked for what I wanted.
I was inspired by all the "1-bit" and "2-bit" pixel artists out there and decided to try my hand at something similar. I think it worked pretty well.
I agree with the others, the art looks great. I especially liked the details of the flowers. Excellent introduction to the grid deduction thing, too, that is some old-school puzzle-ing.
I've been wanting to work on a 1- or 2-bit project. Your work here nails the vibe I was imagining
Wonderful idea. Delightful pixel art. Well done!
This reminds me of a very old (1990) DOS game called Murder! It was one of my fave games growing up. Your game has a lot more depth and is a lot more fun so far! I haven't found a game like it before, and I'm glad I found yours! Great job!
Yeah, it kind-of reminds me of a DOS game called SLEUTH! I loved that game, and when the timer ran out, the killer started stalking you! :D
This is incredible! Minor bug: When going from the Library to the Conservatory, it says you’re entering the Entrance Hall :)
It’s funny to me that you can deduce from photographs that certain people definitely did not have things haha
Hey man, great effort.. great time passer.. love the artstyle too.. if you get some time id love to hear another devs feedback for our game ALIEN CONTAGION FORCE.. thanks man.. again.. great job. Looking forward to see if this goes further.
Wow. This was a lot (in a good way!). Some observations:
I loved the feeling of walking through a mansion, looking at clues and talking to suspects. The mansion was nicely detailed: all the rooms you'd want in a mansion, doors everywhere, windows and portraits and plants and furniture to make it feel complete. And I liked the way some clues were incomplete and needed more investigation (in my run, I found some cigarette ashes in a room, and had to separately find the suspect who smoked cigarettes).
The thing I think it needed the most was a map: I had trouble in some places even figuring out where I'd already been, and the note telling me that so-and-so was in the study only helped if I could find the study again!
(The game occasionally lagged--froze up, did nothing, and then woke up a few seconds later--but that might have been my computer and not the game.)
Overall, this is really cool!
Hey, cool, I was working on adding a map when this comment came in! I still have a few hours until my deadline is up, so I'm putting some final tweaks on the game. I've uploaded a new version with the map functionality. It also includes the ability to clear your mind map if you want to start over and removes some debugging scaffolding I was using for testing.
Thanks for playing!
This is awesome! Played through a short mystery, found the murderer! 🔪🩸
Excellent game, as always :)
Glad you enjoyed it! I hope you caught the murderer!
Yup! I liked the clues that were like "Exactly one of the following is true" because that seems like something a detective in a mystery show might come up with and then resolve later, but I didn't like the ones where people are mentioned by differing attributes and implicitly we are to assume this means those attributes must not apply to those people (because each entry is a separate person) so much, because each motive or room applying to exactly one suspect doesn't feel appropriate to the genre, to me. In the end I got the murderer, though, which was nice, if a bit anticlimactic. Like I said, though, overall the game was quite fun and fairly unique (though c.f. The Inquisitor), and the synthesis of writing and gameplay was quite a bit better than the few other games in the genre I have played. It's also quite different from the other games I've played by you, which is in keeping with the rest of your games as they are all pretty different from each other, which I think is pretty cool. My favorite is still No Crypto for Old Men, though.