Feature: Investigating Detective Games

With the recent release of L.A. Noire, detective games have been on my mind. So I decided to spend a few days trying to track down the “perfect” detective game. This mostly involved firing up games I’d played many years ago, but I also sampled some new ones along the way. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find my perfect detective game, though I did discover a newfound disdain for pixel hunting. The journey did, however, give me insight on ways the genre can improve.

In Search of Evidence

Looking at detectives in other forms of entertainment, generally the most interesting aspect of these characters is their ability to infer what a particular piece of evidence means. They add together these inferences to formulate a theory of the crime. Whether it’s Sherlock Homes or Goren of L&O: Criminal Intent, it’s entertaining to watch the detective as they piece together the entire case, typically right in front of the perpetrator.

While being a passive participant in solving a case is acceptable for most mediums, a video game is ideally as active as possible. What frustrates me is that most detective games focus so much on finding a piece of evidence just to spoil what the evidence means with internal monologue. This idea of the main character’s narration clearly comes from hard-boiled detective films, where it’s a great device. But unfortunately, it just doesn’t translate over to games as well.

Imagine the board game Clue, except instead of the fun mechanic of making an accusation, once you gathered evidence the game would just tell you who the killer is. That would be a pretty boring version of Clue. Now granted, most games don’t take it to that extreme level, but the point remains. I don’t want the game to tell me how every item is related to the case – I should have to make the determination myself.

In fact, I would argue that the rote process of collecting evidence should be a secondary gameplay component, at best. Especially in law enforcement, it doesn’t make sense for a detective to spend so much time scouring for evidence. It’s the reason why you have teams of crime scene techs that gather everything. Their job is to gather the evidence, and your job should be to filter the evidence and piece together what it means.

Law & Order: Dead on the Money was especially egregious in the use of these so-called “hidden object puzzles.” You literally mouse over the entire crime scene, waiting for the cursor to turn into a magnifying glass that flags interactive items. And trust me, there are a lot of objects to pick up. Even though this part of the game was horrendous, what I really liked was that when you picked up an item, the game would give you very limited information. It was up to you to figure out whether it was useful or junk, and there were a lot of junk items you could grab.

The mechanic used to flag evidence as important in Dead on the Money is pretty ingenious. Essentially, you have to choose which pieces of evidence you want to analyze further. This could involve performing lab tests, or researching things like where an item was purchased. Each test ran takes some time in game, so you’re ultimately limited on how many items you can test. If you tried to run lab tests on every single item found at a crime scene, you would run out of time and not solve the case. In this way, the player is an active participant in making sure focus is placed on the items they feel are important, which I think is a step in the right direction.

But I’d say they could’ve taken this idea a step further. Why not just eliminate the extreme pixel hunting at the crime scene? As soon as you arrive, the tech tells you the obvious things they’ve found. Maybe there are some less obvious items you have to find yourself, but if there’s a pool of blood next to the victim that’s already been flagged, why do you have to click on it for your evidence journal? If the answer is simply to increase the duration of the game, I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to keep the mechanic.

But before you go on Amazon and try to buy the Law & Order game, I should warn you that it’s nowhere near the “perfect” detective game. In fact, it was the worst game I played on my journey. But sometimes even bad games have good ideas. I would be interested in seeing a game that kept their mechanic of flagging the evidence, but removed the blind item searching.

The Freedom to Screw Up

Over time, detective games have become more forgiving. In the olden days, games like Police Quest had so many different ways they could abruptly end. Someone pulled a knife on you, but you didn’t follow exact police procedure to disarm them, so you’re dead. Those game over screens were frustrating, but at the same time didn’t add much difficulty once you got in the habit of saving everywhere.

What was far more nefarious was the ability to reach a dead end without knowing you were at one. For example, in my recent playthrough of Police Quest III: The Kindred, I forgot to get some item on day three of the investigation, and I didn’t realize until two game days later that I needed the item to complete the game. This dead end gameplay was especially popular with Sierra games, but other games like Pandora Directive do have instances of this as well.

Now that’s not very fun, and I generally see it as a sign of lazy design (which is why I prefer LucasArts adventures which don’t dead end). But the reverse is also problematic, which was on display in L.A. Noire. As I noted in my review, you can screw up almost everything, be a total failure of an investigator, and still advance in the game.

I think the most entertaining solutions lie somewhere in between. If it’s a game where you’re going through a series of cases, maybe messing up previous cases determines what future cases you get. A simple example would be a game where you start out in Vice. If you solve those cases well, you get promoted to Homicide for the rest of the game. Otherwise, you get demoted to Robbery. The game goes on either way, but there is also a clear incentive to perform in order to earn the much-coveted promotion.

For games where there’s only one case to solve, which seems to be more common, I think a mechanic like the “rewind” in The Last Express would work very well. There were several ways your journey on the Orient Express could abruptly end, but if it did end, it would intelligently rewind to the latest point in the game where you still could alter the outcome. This is essentially a fancy checkpoint system, which we see used time and time again in action games. Why more story-based games don’t adopt this idea from The Last Express, I’m not sure. I think compared to the alternatives, it would be more fun to have a detective game that allows me to charge the wrong guy, see how I ruined my career, and then automatically restore to the point where I can fix this.

The implementation of freedom in the investigation is also extremely important. I would argue that essentially any character you run into should be someone you can potentially arrest. If you interrogate the wrong person, you may alienate the witness and lose important testimony. And if you piss off too many people, you might get thrown off the case. To its credit, L.A. Noire did attempt this, but it unfortunately was still too restrictive. In many instances you’re forced to arrest someone who clearly isn’t responsible, and not allowed to push people who should be pushed.

So You’ve Figured It Out? Prove It.

Perhaps I’ve watched too many police procedurals, but an inevitable problem I have with detective games is that I solve the case before the game allows you to. So I’m forced to continue with the case, often with twists and turns that aren’t exciting anymore. I strongly feel that the game should allow me to skip ahead if I outsmart it.

This leads to the problem of designing a mechanic that allows a more astute player to quickly wrap up the case, while at the same time not revealing too much to everyone else. A simple approach might be requiring you to present a certain number of evidence pieces when someone is arrested. If you pick the correct pieces that build a strong case, the game recognizes this and allows you to complete it. If you tie this with the ability to arrest anyone at any time, and severe penalties for arresting the wrong person, I feel you have a workable system where the truly good detectives are rewarded.

By allowing the player to present multiple pieces of evidence, it also avoids a common gripe with the genre. It’s very frustrating in games like Phoenix Wright where there are two items that could both work as evidence, but the game only recognizes one of the pieces. If I’m able to present, for instance, five pieces of evidence, as long as I get 3/5 or 4/5 (depending on the difficulty), I should be able to advance.

Of course, the implementation details are going to be a bit more involved, because you really have to think about what the valid item permutations are. But I don’t think it’s an intractable problem, and since most combinations will end up being completely invalid, you still have a limited set of dialogue lines that need to be recorded.

Final Thoughts

To summarize, here are my primary suggestions:

1. Eliminate excessive hunting for evidence, and instead place more emphasis on requiring the player to figure out which pieces of evidence are relevant.
2. Allow the player the freedom to sweet talk, interrogate, rough up, or arrest most characters encountered.
3. Institute clear penalties of abusing the power given by #2, and at the same time reward the player for making good decisions.
4. If the player cracks the case earlier than expected, allow them to present this to the game and close the case early with high marks.

I believe that these ideas would be viable to implement. Perhaps they wouldn’t be possible with the degree of freedom I’d prefer, but it certainly is possible in some capacity. At the very least, I hope designers of detective games continue to evolve the genre, and think of ways the player can be further empowered throughout the investigation. I also hope that L.A. Noire leads to more AAA developers delving in the genre, because another 10 years of mostly budget titles would simply be depressing. As always, agree or disagree, be sure to discuss this feature article in the comments below.

References

If you’re curious about the games I played while researching this article, here’s a list:

Blade Runner (1997) – Very difficult to play due to the terrible voice acting that can’t be disabled. Mechanically pretty mediocre, which is how I had remembered the game. SICK CANARY. Only available used.

Hotel Dusk (2007) – I haven’t played this enough to give a score.

L.A. Noire (2011) – SICK CANARY, as outlined in my review.

Last Express, The (1997) – Beautiful art style, memorable story and voice over. It’s less of a detective game and more an interactive story, but highly recommended. SINGING CANARY. Available on GOG.com.

Law & Order: Dead on the Money (2002) – Very difficult to recommend due to intense focus on pixel hunting for clues and low production values. DEAD CANARY. Available on Amazon.

Pandora Directive, The (1996) – It has a fairly enjoyable story if you can get over the poor FMVs. Some of the puzzles are ridiculous Myst-style puzzles, but it’s a solid experience with several endings. HAPPY CANARY. Available on GOG.com.

Police Quest: Open Season (1993) – Terrible voice acting (which thankfully can be disabled) and an uneven story. Denouement is essentially a series of inventory combination puzzles. Art style doesn’t hold up at all. SICK CANARY. Available on GOG.com.

Police Quest III: The Kindred (1991) – Unforgiving gameplay that’s too focused on police procedure and avoiding random deaths. Story is better than Open Season, but not by much. SICK CANARY. Available on GOG.com.

Feature articles appear every Wednesday on Game Canary.

Categories: Features

Tags: Detective Games

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