Crafting a Replayable Murder Mystery in Murderous Muses

Hi, I’m Lynda, one of the writers and game designers at D’Avekki Studios. We started our supernatural mystery series almost two years back. Murderous MusesWe had a crystal clear vision. To create a murder mystery we could solve over and over again. In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the things we’ve done during development to make every playthrough unique!

Frame by Frame

Solving a murder mystery is usually a one and done affair and if you know whodunit, there’s really no reason to replay. You can still get involved in the investigation. Murderous MusesLike our other games, (Doctor Dekker’s Infectious Madness, the Shapeshifting Detective: Randomization of the killer occurs at each start of every round. That means that the murderer can be any of the six suspects every time you play – the undertaker, the clockmaker, the burlesque dancer, the tennis player, the criminologist or the ventriloquist.

This time we wanted to vary the mystery even more, so we decided to create nine different pieces of evidence that could be shuffled and shown as clips from a late night TV show, “Mirlhaven’s Unsolved Mysteries”.

In every playthrough, you’ll be able to solve the murder using just three of these evidence ‘frames’. You can therefore focus in one game on the murder time, evidence at the scene, or the antique weapon. But in the next you might be investigating the mysterious call you received, a rope piece, or an occult symbol made in blood.

You must be able to outsmart the gallery to find three clues that will lead you to each suspect. This is a large part of detective work. These clues are also scattered so that the steps to finding the killer differ in each game.

It’s Alive!

Murderous MusesIn this game, you will play the part of the security guard who works the night shift at a haunted gallery. The supernatural theme was a key part of our playthroughs. We knew this from the beginning. You feel like you are constantly changing the environment around the gallery as new galleries and corridors appear every night.

It’s not just the walls that move either. The “open-world” gameplay lets you hang suspect portraits on various plaques in the gallery to reveal FMV clues about the murder. Early versions of the gallery had static keywords but we quickly realised during testing that it wasn’t really challenging enough, so we added a “clockwork” mechanism to change the keyword after you hang a painting. That means you’ll need to hunt for keywords and manipulate the plaques to use them – so each new gallery becomes one big environmental puzzle.

Stories with layers

We had to first have a story. Also, it was important to plan how we would reveal more of the story each time you play.

The evidence that I’ve already talked about covers the nitty gritty of the case, but uncovering the suspects’ full motives requires a bit more digging. Every time you hang a suspect portrait you’ll reveal a bit more about what was going on between them and the victim, and why they might have wanted him dead.

You’re revealing these secrets in a non-linear fashion, so one of our concerns during development was that you might lose track of the story threads – especially if you left at some time between playthroughs. To combat this, we took inspiration from Double Fine Productions’2012 adventure The CaveCave paintings were used as background summaries in this case. So now, after you’ve seen a set of videos that reveal an important part of a suspect’s story, you’ll unlock a new “character lore” painting that ties all those threads together into one neat narrative package.

There’s so much more I could talk about – replayable puzzles, collectibles, the over-over-arching story! – but this article is long enough already. Hopefully, you’ll discover those for yourself as Murderous MusesXbox Live today launches

Murderous Muses

D’Avekki Studios

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$14.49

It’s been a year since controversial artist Mordechai Grey was murdered.

Now, a new exhibition is opening on the anniversary of his death, featuring six of his most famous portraits – each one a potential suspect in his murder.

Play as a security officer and explore the galleries in the echoing hour to find clues. Solve puzzles and use the Eyes of Mordechai to bring the portraits to life, restoring the past to find his killer…

From the creators of The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, The Shapeshifting Detective and Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, Murderous Muses is an infinitely replayable supernatural whodunit where choosing how to investigate is an art form…