Murderous Muses Review

Murderous Muses follows on from D’Avekki Studio’s prior output in that it heavily features Live Action FMV as a core part of the experience. What differs here though is how the gameplay is presented, being more of an explorative first person title than simply a watch-and-choose affair. This approach took us a little while to get our head round, but for the most part it proved to be an enjoyable twist.

The gist is then that we’re a night watch guard at a local art exhibit, featuring works from murdered artist Mordechai Grey. While the case of his murder was never solved, the few titbits of information we do know is that before he died Mordechai painted portraits of six notable people from the island of Mirlhaven, and one of these is believed to be responsible for his murder.

We spend three nights within the exhibit, each following a set routine. Firstly, we must correctly place six paintings that have been delivered to the exhibit based on the name tags, before setting off into our part of the renewed murder investigation. Each night offers us the chance to expose more of the six accused people’s stories and alibi’s, with the aim of figuring out who killed Mordechai Grey.

While the placing of the pictures is easy enough, once we’re onto investigating things get a bit trickier, with several components to tackle. Under each person’s portrait we find three key words; these words can be found on buttons along the walls of the exhibit, and we must place the correct person’s portrait above the right one before clicking the button and watching the short FMV clip. It’s not as simple as this though, as each time we use a word the button rotates to a new word as dictated by the specific exhibits list.

So, we need to make sure we’re carefully placing each of the portraits to get the correct words at the right time – something made even harder by the fact that each portrait only has 6 ‘uses’ noted by little orbs – known as Eyes of Mordechai – in the frame. Run out of these and that portrait becomes useless. These uses can be topped up by finding extra Eyes dotted about or by sacrificing them from another portrait (though we only get one for every two we sacrifice).

The tutorial that kicks off the adventure left us a little lost, and we found ourselves completely wasting all of our initial orbs before we realised we were on the wrong track. Once we’d gotten to grips with this, it became fairly straightforward to get enough buttons to unlock all three of the characters key words, which then unlocks a short clip of the police investigation with them. These form the backbone of the information needed to figure out the killer, and can be watched again at anytime before the end.

Outside of this, there is also a single extra puzzle per night to complete, going through pattern solving, a game of snap, and a version of Simon Says. The first of these is the trickiest by far thanks to it being a bit more obtuse to figure out. Clearing these unlocks an extra room with some extra context for what’s going on in the form of a video from your boss Sasha, an urn to place in the gallery (that unlocks yet another FMV) and a bonus word that may offer more hints too. There are also extra rooms that offer more insights into each character by unlocking extra words each night. These carry over through our sessions (replays are highly encouraged as it’s impossible to unlock everything in one go) and mean we need to weigh up syphoning off extra orbs or gaining extra the extra information.

Another wrinkle in this equation is the Tips Line, where we can exchange six orbs in order to remove one of the six as a suspect. Played well we could potentially half our list, though for our runs we found it more beneficial to unlock the extra character information. Further runs will definitely be making use of this aspect mind you.

Once we’ve gather all the police investigation clips we can for the night, we head back to our desk to move on to the next day. At the end of night three, we must choose a suspect to accuse, and it’s here that we must admit that we did not do well at all.

See, across four playthroughs of the game, we’ve yet to deduce both who the killer is, or indeed how it could have been who it ended up being when we’re shown the right answer. Each playthrough is unique in placement of pictures and puzzle solutions, and the library of video clips offered to us. We were sure we had it locked down as one member of the cast on our last attempt, and yet it turned out to be someone we’d all but written off. Thinking back on the clues given by them as well as the police interviews, we were left confused how it could have been this person. Granted, we’re not the greatest detectives in the world – and it’s likely we’re missing something – but to go to all the effort of unlocking pretty much every scene we could only to then go wrong can be a bit deflating.

Each night is themed after a specific part of the investigation (presented by the wonderfully dramatic Klemens Koehring) and these are also randomised, leading to the need to deduce different clues on each run.

While the concept of randomised runs is a neat twist on the investigation gameplay, we did find it to be somewhat tricky to get our heads round even after several playthroughs. Murderous Muses requires us to pay full attention at all times and, like a good detective, read between the lines. More cunning players than us will fare better, but a tiny bit more handholding would have been fine by us.

Luckily the performances are at least entertaining enough, bouncing between the dramatic prose of scientist-turned-clockmaker Xavier, moody yet direct twins Sunday and Monday, casually manic undertaker Lilleth, attention-seeking performer Dominque, firm and confident Vice Justice Catherine, and recovering alcoholic/party animal/ventriloquist Otto. Each character is brought to life convincingly (albeit in the same camp manner as Dark Nights with Poe and Munroe), and if anything, we might have preferred a more traditional live action approach of dialogue choices so we could get to spend more time with these characters. Each of the clips we watch vary in length, from a few seconds to half a minute or so, but there’s no real rhyme or reason to what length each one will be. There are some twists and turns in the story, and we’re keen to carry on playing to unlock more of each person’s tale too.

Conclusion

The concept of Murderous Muses is great, with randomised runs meaning every game can and will play out differently, giving dedicated players a new challenge to solve each time. However, unless you’re completely invested it can be tricky to keep track of the clues given. Some wonderfully camp acting and an over the top story at least makes even failed runs entertaining, though a little more help – especially early on – wouldn’t have gone amiss.