Mystery Games and the Sliding Scale of Immersion
Some mystery games are more mystery game-y than others
Let’s perform a little thought experiment. Let’s Google ‘detective video game’ and examine the results. What do we see?
There are some standards like L.A. Noire, The Wolf Among Us, Heavy Rain, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, and some newer offerings like Disco Elysium, The Return of the Obra Dinn, and Her Story. What do they have in common? In all these games, a crime, generally at least one murder, has been committed, and the player assumes the role of a detective or investigator to solve this crime. But in all these games listed above, one game, in particular, stands apart from the rest in its approach to cracking the case. That game is The Return Of The Obra Dinn.
The Return Of The Obra Dinn puts you in the glamorous shoes of an insurance claims investigator who must get to the bottom of what happened aboard the Obra Dinn, a ship that set sail five years prior, and was assumed to be lost at sea until it mysteriously turned up back in England with not a soul on board. The player is armed with a notebook containing the names of all those on board for the voyage, sketches that feature (almost) everyone on the ship, and a pocket-watch that allows the user to experience the final moments of any corpse it is pointed at, frozen in time. Using these tools, the player must deduce the fates of every person on the list, along the way piecing together how the doomed journey unfolded.
What sets The Return Of The Obra Dinn apart from those other games is that the player must not only solve the fates of all those on board, deducing answers that are explicitly correct or incorrect, but they must do so using only the tools that the character possesses. That is to say, there are no medium-related hints like a certain dialogue option becoming available after discovering a certain item or the story progressing after a crucial action is performed. You have exactly the same information as the investigator that you play as, and the game’s win state is the player correctly discovering the fate of every single name on the list.
Contrast this with Disco Elysium, a game in which you play an alcoholic detective sent to a considerably more lawless part of town to investigate a murder. The investigation is performed much as any real-world case would be: the corpse is examined and later autopsied, people around the scene of the murder are interrogated, and the surrounding area is swept for clues. But as anyone who’s played the two can attest, Disco Elysium is very different from The Return Of The Obra Dinn. The game’s story, for all its sprawling dialogue options and numerous side quests, is more or less linear. The reveal of the murderer’s identity happens as a part of the game’s story and the player does not need to correctly state the murderer’s identity to progress or win.
Here’s my proposed classification: detective games exist on a scale of how thick or thin the wall is between you the player and the detective character you play as. I’m going to call this the scale of immersion, with that wall being the thinnest at the highest levels of immersion. In this piece, I’m going to go over games with high and low immersion and what I think makes them that way. I’m going to make a lot of generalizations and there are exceptions to every characteristic or ‘rule’ I list. There won’t be any major plot spoilers for the games I discuss here, but I will be talking about how these games tell their story which is equally important as the story for many of these games, so proceed with caution.
Highly Interactive Games
Examples: Her Story, The Return of the Obra Dinn, The Painscreek Killings, The Outer Wilds
The single most important thing these games have in common is the huge amount of freedom given to the player in going about their investigation, with minimal hand-holding. In Her Story, a game where you uncover the mystery of who murdered a man by searching through disordered fragments of police interrogation footage of his wife, it’s entirely up to the player which keywords to type into the antiquated search engine, to bring up clips containing that word. In the remaining three games listed as examples, the player is free to explore the game’s primary area from the beginning and can start anywhere they like.
Although Her Story is the most blatant about it, all of these games tell their story through fragments scattered across the game world that follow little to no chronological order. In the Outer Wilds, each location visited on each planet contains some relevant information, and the player is free to uncover this information in any order they wish. In The Painscreek Killings, three major areas are open from the beginning, each of which leads to other areas becoming accessible. And on the decks of the Obra Dinn, the different corpses you discover belonged to people who lost their lives at different points in the story. However, of all these games, the story in Obra Dinn more or less unfolds in reverse chronological orders barring a few exceptions.
The fragmented nature of the storytelling in these games goes hand in hand with the huge amount of player freedom these games have. In both Her Story and The Outer Wilds especially, it is possible to stumble onto major plot points very early on in the game, but since it is only a fragment without context, the player won’t be able to make any sense of it. They will still need to keep playing to understand the context for why what they have discovered is so important. The reverse chronological order of Obra Dinn also does this to an extent, first showing you big events and then all the little things that led up to those moments.
The Return of The Obra Dinn and The Painscreek Killings explicitly ask the player for answers to the mystery, with the best endings to those games locked behind the correct answers. Although the Outer Wilds doesn’t ask for an answer like the previous two games, (and given its story, it really can’t), obtaining the best ending does require you to be in possession of most of the significant pieces of information in the game. Her Story stands out in this regard, as the player can decide to have the credits rolled after a certain percentage of clips are viewed.
So, putting it all together, immersive detective games generally give the player a huge amount of freedom in how they navigate the central mystery. They tell their stories through fragments that can be found in any order, with the player slowly putting all the pieces together. And these games may ask you for an answer to the central mystery with the golden ending being locked behind the right answer, or ensure that the player has acquired a sufficient amount of information before giving them an ending.
Low(er) Immersion Games
Examples: Heavy Rain, The Wolf Among Us, Disco Elysium, Most Point-And-Click Mystery Games
Calling these games ‘Low Immersion’ (I even added the ‘-er’ to soften it) makes it sound like a bad thing. But I don’t think these games are automatically inferior simply because they’re not full-fledged detective games. They represent another way of telling a mystery story, a way that may not seem to take full advantage of the interactivity inherent to video games. But like a mystery novel or movie, this allows them to foreground characters and settings in ways that the games of higher immersion often cannot.
These are games in which the story and the central themes of the story are as important as the story’s driving mystery. Disco Elysium is a character study, a meditation on themes such as addiction, failure, and the impact that political ideology has on day-to-day life, with the murder that kicks off the plot being a gateway to these topics. From a genre and mechanics point of view as well, Disco Elysium is a mashup of a role-playing game and a point-and-click adventure game. Games that fall into this category tend to incorporate point-and-click adventure game elements even if they don’t use the format traditionally associated with the genre.
Two games that I think illustrate these points are Life Is Strange and Gone Home. These are games that don’t really fall under the umbrella of detective/mystery games but do contain several features that I think define this sort of game. Both games have a mystery or question that kicks off the plot. In Gone Home, it’s ‘Why is the house empty? Where is the protagonist’s family?’. Life Is Strange has two to begin with: ‘Where do Max’s powers come from?’ and ‘What happened to Rachel Amber?’, before the story uncovers several more mysteries.
In Gone Home, the answer to the central mystery comes from reading letters, looking at personal items, and listening to audio recordings. You the player, come to learn what kind of people the members of Kate’s family are, and Kate learns what her family, and especially her sister has been up to in the year that Kate has been away. Life Is Strange follows a loop of exploring an area, in which you interact with items, talk to other characters until a cutscene is triggered and the story advances. The story, like Disco Elysium, is about the characters, the setting, and the themes as the game’s mysteries. These types of games generally don’t require you to make correct deductions to get the best endings or advance the story; the reveal of the culprit generally happens as a part of the game’s story, as seen in Life Is Strange and LA Noire. Both games are also more-or-less linear which restricts player freedom but allows for nuanced and thematically rich stories to be told. Lower interactivity with the central mystery, but deeper storytelling.
So, to wrap it all up, highly-immersive mystery games put you in the shoes of the investigator by giving you huge amounts of freedom to explore the game world and follow leads in any order that you like. The freedom granted to the player is complemented by the story being revealed in snippets that generally don’t follow a particular chronological order. Low(er) immersion detective games firmly separate you the player from the character you play as, don’t rely on player deductions as inputs, and progress the story in a more linear fashion. But these elements allow for more complex stories, fleshed-out characters, and thematically richer content. So, the answer to the question of which is better? Both. Both are good.
