Clue: Murder By Death Review

clue: murder by death, cocodrolo games

Lets start out by setting the scene. It’s 1932, there’s been a murder in Lord Anderson’s estate. Unfortunately it is actually Lord Anderson who has passed and yet, before the murder can be investigated by the fine folks at Scotland yard, you are called upon to get down to the truth of it all. Lies, deception, love, and the afterlife. There is quite a bit going on in this mansion and you only have two hours to unravel the stories. Are you up to the task?

Clue: Murder by Death feels like a straightforward whodunnit until you realize there is more at play here. Lord Anderson had quite a few interests that are outside of the norm. This may also be a family trait as you’ll soon discover with Lady Rose’s lover being Mr. D (for Dracula of course) and Lady Sophie taking after her uncle and enjoying archaeology. Interesting that this is Sophie’s interest and there’s a mummy on the estate isn’t it?

Mr. D and the wandering mummy aren’t the only things you’ll find that feel out of place. As you explore you’ll find secret passages, skeletons, and blood. There’s definitely much more at play here than just a simple murder. You won’t get to dive deep into all of those stories but certain side stories will unravel for you the more you explore. For those who want to explore each character’s story and trajectory, we won’t spoil too much. However, just don’t be surprised when you find more bodies than you bargained for and a quite an array of odd experiments pertaining to the afterlife.

Game Play

As the detective, choose two potential suspects to be your assistants for the next two hours while you investigate. This does mean that these two are unavailble for interrogation during this time so make sure you swap them out on your next run. You’ll start as the investigator telling everyone to go to their room and wait. Except the two you elect of course. They will get to explore the mansion as they please to investigate. You’ll want to make sure that you look at everything with each character to ensure you get the full picture. Each character will have different reactions to items and other characters so you’ll want to be sure you investigate everything.

Thankfully, any items worth seeing will highlight blue and anything you can grab will highlight a yellowish circle underneath. Unfortunately, your characters are can only hold so much. Each character can only hold three items at a time. There are also items that can be combined so you’ll want to make sure you keep an eye out for those. The characters will normally hint at what you can combine but you must clue in very closely to their hints to catch it. Combining the items is sometimes a bit frustrating as if your inventory is already filled, you’ll have to make room for the new item. Hopefully this is something they can fix in the near future.

Even vampires aren’t immune to a mouse trap.

Interesting enough in the game, your characters do have Hit Points. Why? Well because if you aren’t paying enough attention and walk over a few too many mousetraps or inhale too much poisonous substance, your character may well pass out. Should your character pass out you’ll lose 15 minutes of play time even if your other characters are healthy. Although if you’re looking to speed up the time a bit, this is a strategy you can use.

At the end of the 2 hours, you’ll be brought right to the screen to make your accusation with the information you’ve collected. You’ll bring what you’ve deduced to Scotland yard when they arrive. Have you uncovered enough information? Were you able to get to the truth of it all before they arrived?

It was the butler in the kitchen with the candlestick. Oh wait wrong game.

What it Does Well

Seeing the different character interactions depending on who you play as is a great touch. Getting to see the responses and relationships through the various characters shows the depth of the writing. It’s nice to see that there was a lot of thought and nuance given to how the characters intertwine and converse with each other. You can almost feel how varied the conversations are with each character. The love that characters have for their family members, some of the uncertainty the help has for some of the others. It all leads to the intertwined stories happening in the game.

Some of the item combinations are a bit clever as well. They do make you think and put the pieces together well. What can you find in these rooms that will work together? What will be helpful to bypass the police officers who won’t let you outside or can you find another way around. For some things, there may be more than one solution, but this isn’t common.

The art style is also quite cute with the characters. They feel like they should be cute vinyl figures that you display on your desk. Most of the characters are also distinct minus some of the maids in certain lighting or in certain areas. Overall, the character design works for the feel of the game.

Room for Improvement

Of course, like anything else, there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, there is a lot of room for improvement. The size of the mansion is just a bit too big for this game. It doesn’t help that the map has almost no labels on anything. While the bedrooms will show you who sleeps in each, other rooms are unmarked. How do I get back to the kitchen? The dining room? How do I even get back to where Lord Anderson’s body lay waiting for an inspection? This was actually quite a bit frustrating when knowing you wanted to travel back to a room later on.

What are all these rooms? Even after so many runs I couldn’t pinpoint which room is which.

The other aspect that is a bit frustrating is that after the first 20ish minutes, some characters aren’t where they are supposed to be. This does mean if you are looking for a specific person, you may waste time looking for them. In a house that is so large, this feels even more frustrating with no way of knowing where they may have gone. There are no hints to where they are. Instead you may have to just hope you come across them as you search the 160+ rooms for clues. It is quite a bit for a two hour time frame where you have three characters to control.

Another frustrating bit, although realistic, is that Items aren’t shared between your three investigators. This can mean if the investigator needs a key from Miss Gray, you have to bring them all together to swap items or open the door. This is frustrating if you want to see the different perspectives in a room. Thematically it makes sense to not have the doors open for everyone to hide evidence, but the suspension of reality would be nice in these moments. Again, you end up wasting time swapping characters to bring them together. Frustrating, especially when they have so few inventory slots.

Oh hello Mr. Ghost. Have you seen anything suspicious? Will you remain here long term? (Hint, no they won’t.)

When you have to walk around so much and bring the characters together while they are still unable to interrogate each other, the two hours drags on. While two hours of game time doesn’t sound like a long time, going through a run of this after you’ve done your first two or three feels like too much. There was a time where a two hour game play session would fly by. Unfortunately with this, it doesn’t feel so quick.

It doesn’t help that the navigating around the rooms takes so long, especially when many hallways look too similar. There isn’t a way to really distinguish the corridors too well. Every hallway is named the corridor and without going back and forth to the map, its hard to tell where you are. While there is some variance in the way the different areas look, over the two hours they blend together all too well. It’s sometimes frustrating when you try to find a certain persons room. Additionally, there aren’t really indications of when you can move to the next area of the map. You have to seem like you’re practically walking off the edge to continue wandering the corridor. Occasionally there are also areas where its a dead end but not clearly marked. An arrow or two might work wonders.

How do I escape this corridor? Can I go north? South? East? What are my options?

You have to play through the game multiple times to get the full truth using all of the POVs. This is fine, except that the runs are quite long and nothing carries over except the knowledge you have in your head. So even if your investigator has already uncovered the hidden passage behind the dresser in a previous run, you’ll have to bring the item back to open up the passageway again. While this is realistic, it does mean you’re wasting time. Or at least it feels like wasting time doing the same action again. If you have to play through multiple times for all perspectives, allowing something to carry over would be nice. Even if it requires a bit of suspension of reality. This is a video game after all, we don’t need it to perfectly mimic real life.

Overall

Unfortunately the game suffers from potentially being a bit too ambitious. Clue: Murder By Death has the bones of something that can be fantastic but gets in its own way from time to time. Perhaps it is the idea of trying to play out very realistically. The idea of the game happening in real time is fun until you realize you have to repeat some of the same tasks from your previous runs again and again. Or perhaps it is that they want to make it feel more difficult by making sure that character A doesn’t leave the door unlocked for your other investigators to roam around. While all the notes are shared between characters, the items are not, and with limited pocket sizing and too large of a mansion to explore, the fun of solving puzzles is overshadowed by the tedious repetition the game expects you to complete.

Should Clue: Murder By Death ever add in some quality of life basics, even just labeling the rooms, or allowing you add markers, this could be a wonderful mystery. For now, unfortunately, its one where it feels fine to leave quite a few stones unturned.