After spending hours poring over Alan Wake 2 this week, corkboards full of photos, red string and important little clue nuggets have definitely been on my brain. Alas, Remedy’s horror-fuelled detective ’em up keeps its problem-solving a little too much at arm’s length for my tastes. Every piece of evidence you collect has its own set place on the board, for example, and heck, even the thrill of joining the dots with a set of pins and string is taken away from you, as its deduction work is all swept up in a wave of automation.
Happily, other developers are stepping in to fill that string-based gap, and chief among them is the French-made Chronique Des Silencieux, whose Steam demo I played over lunch today. You play as a rookie detective in this charming point and click game, and your entire raison d’etre is to point out contradictions Phoenix Wright-style between testimonies you gather and the evidence you accumulate. Only instead of shouting, “Objection!” you do it by manually sticking pins and red string between the offending bits of information. It’s delightful, and well worth a nose if old Alan leaves you wanting this weekend.
The demo itself is a little bit buggy at the moment (even in the space of a lunch hour, I had one attempt crash irreparably and another freeze when I brought up the menu screen), but the proof of concept seems sound. Set in France during the 1970s, you play Eugene, a naive amateur sleuth who rocks up in Bordeaux looking for his uncle Flavio. Alas, after tracking down his place of residence, you find he’s been locked up for beating up a local thug, and just like that, you immediately get embroiled in all his sordid business dealings.
What follows is a lot of interviewing, uncovering new lines of investigation and topics to quiz people on, before retreating to your notebook to get your detective hat on. There are a couple of stages to Eugene’s sleuthing – first is the connections stage, where its excellent wibbly string physics make themselves felt. There’s a fair amount of information to sift through, admittedly, especially when you’ve got a dozen-odd topics you can ask people about, and multiple perspectives to match them with. It made me appreciate just how clean and elegant Phoenix Wright’s four-to-five sentences are in its court case scenes, and I suspect that without a bit of further guidance in Chronique Des Silencieux, wading through it all may become a bit of a problem further down the line.
Still, the actual act of spotting the contradiction, holding down your mouse to land the first pin, and then dragging the other end to sink it into the testimony or piece of evidence (whichever way round you decide to do it) is very satisfying, and I like how the string sags and straightens as you wiggle it round the screen.
Once you’ve made some connections, you can also form hypotheses about them, too. This is done by linking two subjects together on a special padlock screen, and matching motives such as ‘Finance’, ‘Ruin’ and ‘Threaten’ to them in the form of keys to, presumably, ‘unlock’ new pathways in your investigation. The imagery is perhaps a touch heavy-handed, but it’s an eye-catching narrative device all the same.
Really, though, I’m mostly here for the lovely twang of those red strings. This is how you do evidence boards properly, Mr. Wake, so I hope you’re taking notes for your eventual DLC. As mentioned above, I do have a couple of concerns about how easy the whole thing will be to parse and sift through once you’re dealing with bigger swathes of information, but for now, I’m quietly intrigued. If you’d like to give Chronique Des Silencieux a try, its demo is available on Steam right now.
