Game news 8 investigation games that will have left their mark on ghosts
Games that allow you to do your best and investigate dirty or mysterious events are not easy to find. Given the difficulty of developing a game that allows the player the freedom to draw their own conclusions while keeping the narrative on track, realizing that the practice is tricky. We have therefore put together a small, non-exhaustive selection of the best detective and investigation games that take up very different aspects.
Compared to most of the games in this selection, this is an entirely different register we’re talking about that could end up being pretty far from the Investigative Game, but nonetheless Disco Elysium is hard to ignore in these columns. The almost revolutionary role-playing game by ZA / UM effectively puts you in the position of a completely alcoholic ex-police officer, whose memory was lost in the last bottle of alcohol. However, finding your identity will only be a starting point as a corpse is being hanged in the back yard of the hotel where you wake up. It is up to you to understand the circumstances surrounding this death from the alcohol mist. With no screens asking you to draw conclusions, Disco Elysium guides you through the investigation in the most subtle and natural way. Not only can Disco Elysium ask about a preference for reading, but it can also talk to fans of role-playing, adventure or investigative games.
If you didn’t already know, Terry Pratchett adapted a handful of games from the famous Disc World saga, and an investigation game is directly inspired by it. Responding to the name Disworld Noir, this game gives you the chance to play as Lewtton, a private detective who meets all the requirements of the archetype of his profession.
As is often the case when developers tackle the investigation game, the format chosen is unusual. Your story falls into this category of unclassifiable games. However, if we could define it in FMV as some kind of interactive adventure that features a real actress, Viva Seifert, your story goes beyond that. The principle is simple: you are in charge of the investigation to lift the veil on murder and you must use the tools at your disposal to achieve your goals. Your most important asset: the CornerStone engine, which enables you to consult interviews with a suspect by basing your search on keywords. Little by little, listening and taking notes will naturally put the pieces of the puzzle together as long as you know where and what to look for. Although it is better to leave it at that in order not to interrupt the surprise or to reveal too much to you, we can only recommend that you try this experience, which unfortunately and even today is only available to you with English subtitles only.
LA Noire was a misunderstood game to some extent. Signed by Rockstar and set in an open world that only serves as a backdrop and offers no additional activities, many have misunderstood the narrative direction of the title published 10 years ago, which is therefore nothing of a GTA-like. You play as Cole Phelps, who after returning from the war decided to continue serving his country by becoming an investigator.. During your various investigations that you lead to different police services, you will have to interview suspects, gather clues and finally try to put together all the elements of the table that will enable you to see that seemingly isolated crimes are quite possible to be part of a larger whole. At that time quite revolutionary for the quality of facial expressions, today LA Noire shows a slight aging, which does not detract from its other great qualities.
It is never easy to find a “real” investigation game. It is often difficult to mix game design constraints and freedom of inference because it is of course impossible for developers to anticipate all of the logical considerations that the multitude of gamers might make. However, by reinventing the investigation game, Obra Dinn managed to make the player feel like a little genius of deduction.. Equipped with a simple notebook and a pocket watch, which has the peculiarity of bringing a frozen moment of a past scene back to life, the task is to reconstruct the catastrophic fate of the ship’s crew. Through observation, and most importantly, a lot of inference, you need to determine the cause of death of hundreds of sailors on the ship in order to understand its fate. Indispensable if you’re not afraid of fiddling with your brain (a lot).
We could have told you the entire Sherlock saga to discuss the best detective games, but we decided to keep just one. The video game adaptations of the most famous detectives were consistently very well done, but Crimes & Punishment marked a pretty pivotal turning point in the saga. Getting closer to the real investigation game than the puzzle and puzzle game, Crimes and Punishment enjoys a very successful atmosphere and, above all, investigations that are becoming more and more difficult.that will test your deductive skills. Knowing that it is possible to convict innocent people, the pressure goes up and this episode of Sherlock is perhaps one of the best in the saga. Note that Chapter One, a new iteration of the Detective’s Adventures, has just been released and takes over the base of the saga as it pushes it into a pretty neat open world.
With The Last Express we bring you a double leap into the past. The cult game and yet too quickly forgotten game did not appear until 1997. In addition, the game puts you in the middle of the Orient Express at the beginning of the 20th century. If we are ready to acknowledge that the game is closer to point’n click than a pure investigation game, it should be noted that the police dimension certainly does not lag behind. In fact, you play Robert Cath, an American wanted by the police who just got on the famous train to find a friend there. Unfortunately, you will find that he was murdered on board. You take his place and try to understand the circumstances surrounding his death. So you can question the passengers of the train and, above all, observe that a scent of mystery lurks over the people on board and that each one seems to be playing a double game. But the greatest strength of The Last Express is that it takes place in “real time”, meaning that all passengers go about their business regardless of their own schedule.. Do not hesitate to sniff around at certain times of the day or night to pick up a compromising conversation or other information useful for the investigation. With no missing quest log or destination marker, The Last Express relies heavily on your logic to guide you through this terrifyingly memorable adventure.
If, prior to its release, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was intrigued by both the photorealism of its surroundings and the amazement of the former Painkiller developers who made a game without confrontation, the title ultimately made an impact on the investigation it proposed to perform on you. You play Paul Prospero, an occult detective who goes to Red Creek Valley after receiving a letter from Ethan Carter. There he discovers a whole series of bloody murders as well as the disappearance of the young man who used his services. Yes Ethan Carter certainly has a great “walking simulator” dimension, but is not stingy on puzzles, but much more on clues.. It will therefore be necessary to watch and let yourself be carried away by the atmosphere to discover the catastrophic events that have taken place in this magnificent and seemingly peaceful valley.
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