Preview | Murder Mystery Machine |

LifeisXbox’s Murder Mystery Machine preview | Time to bring out your inner detective and investigate a series of crimes! In Murder Mystery Machine, a game by Blazing Griffin, you join the District Crime Agency and enter into the mindset of a true detective. Playing as Cassandra Clarke, you combine forces with your partner Nate Hutson and investigate the murder of a prominent politician. Do you have what it takes to be a true detective? While playing the demo that was available during LudoNarraCon, I discovered I wouldn’t be the greatest detective of all time, but I would do okay! Let me walk you through the short demo gameplay.

The game

Cassandra Clarke is new at the DCA, and her assigned partner is kind of a reluctant douche detective. They get handed a case of a murdered politician called Frank Daniels, and even though everything seems to be very straightforward, the full game promises to become a complex and interconnected series of crimes. Sign me up, alright! Apparently, the story was written by professional film and TV writers, so I’m actually very curious to see the entire investigation unfold. For now, you can go through scene one, parts one to three. The end of the demo says that the complete season one is coming soon and there will be a total of 8 episodes (so I think 8 scenes with sub-scenes).

Features

Murder Mystery Machine has some interesting features, especially the deducting mechanisms that come into play. The workspace looks like the ones you see in the movies: you gather evidence, it goes up ‘on the board’, and then you connect certain pieces of evidence to make deductions. There are even red lines indicating what you’ve connected so far. It does get a bit chaotic near the end when you’re close to coming to an answer for the scene, so I did feel like you should be able to delete wrong connections you’ve made, just to keep your workspace organized.

When you’re uncovering various clues and making connections and deductions, you’ll also be unlocking new dialogues with suspects, witnesses, and your partner. This way you can confront suspects with what you’ve just discovered, and you can discuss your findings with Nate. Oh, and don’t worry if you get stuck, you can just click the magnifier and it’ll point you in the right direction. Quite helpful, really!

The graphics are rather basic (and mobile-game-like) but since they’re not the focus of this game at all, I didn’t really mind. You’ll be focussing on deductions and making sense of everything in your workspace, so not a lot of attention will be paid towards the details of the graphics.

Murder Mystery Machine is a game that was originally made to play on your phone and it shows, unfortunately. Bringing a smartphone/Facebook game to PC or consoles is always a hard task, and usually, the mobile nature of the game will shine through one way or the other. While playing Murder Mystery Machine, it became very clear all the time that this was a mobile game first.

Conclusion

Even though I couldn’t shake the mobile feeling, I’m still very interested in the story and seeing it unfold. Murder Mystery Machine is releasing on PC (Steam), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch later this year!