Creating a repeatable murder mystery in Murderous Muses

Hello, I’m Lynda, one of the writers and game designers at D’Avekki Studios. Almost two years ago we started development of our supernatural police force Murderous Muses with a very clear vision: to create a thriller that you could always solve. In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the things we did during development to make each playthrough unique!

picture by picture

Solving a mystery is usually a one-time affair, and once you know the mystery there’s really no reason to play it again. But in Murderous Museslike our previous games (The Contagious Madness of Doctor Dekker, The Shapeshifting Detective) The killer is randomly selected at the beginning of each game. That means the killer at each game could be any of the six suspects – the undertaker, the watchmaker, 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.

Each playthrough, you can solve the murder with just three of these “frames” of evidence. That means you could focus on the timing of the murder, tracking evidence at the crime scene and the ancient murder weapon in one game, while in another you could be investigating a mysterious phone call, a piece of rope and an occult symbol drawn in blood!

A big part of your detective work is unlocking police interrogations, which you can only do by tricking the gallery to reveal three specific leads for each suspect. We also mix these clues, so the steps you take to find the killer will be different in each game.

It lives!

In Murderous Muses, play as a security guard on the night shift in a haunted art gallery. We decided early on that we wanted to take advantage of the supernatural theme to help make each playthrough different. Not only do the paintings come to life, but new rooms and corridors emerge unpredictably every night, making it feel like the gallery is constantly shifting and changing around you.

It’s not just the walls that move. The “open-world” gameplay allows you to post portraits of suspects on various panels in the gallery to reveal FMV clues about the murder. Previous versions of the gallery had static keywords, but we quickly found during testing that this wasn’t really challenging enough, so we added a “clockwork” mechanism to change the keyword after you’ve hung a painting. That means searching for keywords and manipulating the panels to use them – making each new gallery one big environmental puzzle.

layers of history

Of course, before we got to that, we had to make sure we had a good story. And just as importantly, we had to figure out how to gradually unveil the story so that more and more layers could be unveiled with each game.

The evidence I’ve already talked about covers the gist of the case, but uncovering the suspects’ full motives takes a little more research. Every time you hang a suspect’s portrait, you reveal a little bit more about what was going on between you and the victim and why they might want him dead.

You reveal these mysteries in a non-linear way, so one of our concerns during development was that you might lose track of storylines – especially if you’ve walked between playthroughs at any point. To counteract this, we took inspiration from Double Fine Productions’ 2012 adventure The cave, which used cave paintings as backstory summaries. So, after watching a series of videos that reveal an important part of a suspect’s story, you’ll unlock a new “Character Story” painting that ties all of those threads together into a neat narrative package.

There’s so much more I could talk about – repeatable puzzles, collectibles, the all-encompassing story! – but this article is already long enough. Hopefully you will discover this for yourself as well Murderous Muses launches today on Xbox!