Murdered In The Games Room By Bugs
I don’t think I’ve ever made a Gantt chart while playing a game before. I filled enough square paper with my tiny handwriting and bar charts that I began to look like a serial killer.
Clue: Murder By Death is an odd kind of whodunnit. Its idea of a mystery is to shower you with times and rooms. It imagines Sherlock Holmes as a party-planner, keeping a ledger of everyone’s whereabouts. I had to draw a timetable for each character and map it all out. If Dr Living was in this room at 8pm, would Ms Rose have been nearby and seen him? It was the only way that I would know for sure.
It’s one of many, many idiosyncrasies in Clue: Murder By Death. You won’t have played many games like it – a bit of Cluedo here, some Sexy Brutale there – and that’s its blessing and curse.
Are You A Cluedo Or A Cluedon’t?
The murder (by death) is of Lord Anderson, the owner of the manor. Your task, as Detective John Smith, is to solve that murder by naming your suspect, the weapon and the motive. But that’s getting ahead of yourself: first you need to explore every one of the 166 rooms of the mansion, talk to every character, and come to conclusions before a timer ticks down.
I quite liked the aesthetic in Clue: Murder By Death. Its stubby little characters are somewhere between board game pieces and my kid’s Happy Land toys. The result is a world that’s neatly tactile and suits the Clue name. You could absolutely imagine buying a playset.
You also start with one of Clue: Murder By Death’s neatest touches. You can pick two sidekicks to join you in your investigation. I imagine it’s not good detective practice to enlist some civvies, but it does mean that you have the opportunity to question each character three times over with each character. A maid will talk differently to the butler, for example, so you can play a bit of Downton Abbey and take on the role of both upstairs and downstairs. It’s genuinely impressive how much the clues and statements deviate based on who is collecting them.
Keeping It Real When It Probably Shouldn’t Have
Clue: Murder By Death’s next big idea is realism. You may be a board game piece, but almost everything you do is grounded in reality. You have to travel to the locations of each character to find them, and that location might be fifteen rooms away. There’s no fast-travel and only a few secret passages (as you would expect/hope from a Clue game), so you’re plodding about for much of the runtime.
That realism spreads to the items. You can only carry three of them (more like over-realism, then, as I’m pretty sure I can carry more than three items). So, you’re dropping and picking them up repeatedly, trying to memorise where you dropped them, and storing them on your two randos.
Adding to this realism trinity is a time-frame. You have two hours until the police inspector comes back with additional information, and there’s more time limits after that. You need to come to a conclusion quick-fast, as nobody seems patient enough for you to do a good job.
I get why that realism is there. It’s meant to give the mansion a sense of place, and a feeling like it’s a living setting where people can come and go as they please. There are no shortcuts (well, aside from the actual shortcuts): you need to engage with this space and solve the crime like a real detective would. I can see why that might seem appealing.
My Kingdom For A Fast-Travel System
Problem #1 is that, even with these concessions to realism, the mansion never feels real. I frigging hate the compass in Clue: Murder By Death, because it is an utter lie. It doesn’t really point north like it claims, because the rooms shift orientation according to whichever POV best showcases the room. It means that you can enter a door from the top of the screen, but appear in the room on the left. The mental map of the mansion gets shot to pieces because there’s no consistency of camera. I rarely understood where I was or where I was going.
When you consider that characters teleport, and loading times between rooms are hellish, the big aim towards realism collapses. There’s no positive that comes from it.
And oh boy are there negatives. The map is gargantuan, way too big. You might have come up with an idea – perhaps you have an item that might work in a given situation, or you’ve gained information that you think (hope) will elicit a new response – so you trudge for five minutes to get to the relevant room. But nothing happens. Clue: Murder By Death hasn’t planned for you to do that. So, you’ve wasted five minutes and have to trudge to the next potential progressing idea.
Clue: Murder By Death isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. I desperately wanted a towel and a rope for a particular puzzle, yet I passed – and I’m not kidding here – dozens of towels and ropes. It wanted me to pick up the one it chose to be interactive. You can catch a character in a lie, but Detective Smith will offer no option to talk about it. Got a letter poking out of a dresser? Nope, you can’t use those tongs to pull it out. It wants you to use something else.
The realism could have worked (emphasis on the could) if the other systems supported it. But they’re simplified and blunt. You don’t get to choose dialogue branches: the game does it for you. It wants you to use only specific items in very specific situations.
I think there’s a brilliant game hidden in Clue: Murder By Death. While it’s slightly too concerned about whereabouts at specific times (making it a diary game rather than a deduction game), and the writing is bizarre in places, the murder itself is hugely engaging. There are subplots and suspicious goings-on, and finding out which are relevant to the crime is delightful. I even found joy in my little Gantt chart, as things clashed or contradicted and I found myself in a gotcha! moment. Not that I could always accuse people based on that gotcha.
Sherlock, As Played By Bugs
But what truly torpedoes Clue: Murder By Death, sinking the Battleships of even the people who relish the realism, is the bugs. And these aren’t cosmetic bugs: they’re gamestoppers that have halted our progress on multiple playthroughs.
We have had to play through with Spanish menus and prompts because Clue: Murder By Death won’t accept anything else. We’ve tried to play the tutorial multiple times, but it skips to the end on every occasion. But the kicker is that we’ve had three separate instances of our save corrupting. Characters spawn repeatedly in a single room, and there’s no means of switching to another character or restarting. After fifteen hours of repeated playthroughs, we’ve just had to give up.
Killer Idea, Poor Execution
Clue: Murder By Death has a killer idea: what if you were required to perform every step of a murder investigation? You have to search out each suspect, find and carry each item, and explore every location yourself. That idea has negatives, and they are very much present: travel is slow, load times are awful, and items are finicky to use. But none of the positives truly surface. It never feels like a real case, manor or cast of suspects. Clue: Murder By Death isn’t quite clever or elegant enough to draw those aspects out.
If you want a clear example of ambition outstripping the execution, then Clue: Murder By Death is your case.
Important Links
Clue: Murder by Death Invites Players To Solve A Victorian Mansion Mystery On Console And PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/clue-murder-by-death-invites-players-to-solve-a-victorian-mansion-mystery-on-console-and-pc/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/clue-murder-by-death/9NVTQKZNHQ91/0010
