Happy Birthday is a fantastic mystery/investigation game made in RPG Maker VX Ace.

Mystery games are always very hard to make. There’s just too much to cover, and too many details to think about. You have to create a story that’s presented little by little in terms of clues, that does not make its solution too obvious, but at the same time can be deciphered given the player has gathered enough evidence. It’s very easy to slip, to present contradictory information or not having enough data so that the player would have to guess the solution. I always wanted to make a mystery game, but I was never brave enough to do one.

TearsOfNightfall was incredibly brave, and Happy Birthday is an outstanding mystery game. Right at the beginning, you’re immediately presented with two concomitant questions: who killed 10 year old birthday girl Anna? And... who are you? You play as a detective with no memory of her own life. As you gather clues to solve Anna’s murder, you also hope it may lead to finding more about your own past and identity.

I had huge expectations playing this game, mostly because everyone spoke so highly of it. My first impressions matched my expectations. It’s a very intriguing game. It makes you want to know what’s happening next all the time, and playing it in one sitting was no problem for me. The story unfolds at a perfect pace and the dialog is very well written.

After reaching the end, I must admit the game let me down in some points. Still, it’s good enough as to receive my nomination for 2013 Misaos Game of the Year. Let me try and break it down to what’s good what what could have been better about Happy Birthday.

I liked

• The story itself is very appealing and intelligent. I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, because I can’t talk about it much without spoiling it. But let’s just say you won’t get disappointed in what you’ll learn from uncovering the game’s mysteries.

• Pacing is perfect. You start the game with no information about anything. Information is gathered little by little, and they don’t conflict with each other. At the middle of the game, you get the feeling that “I know a lot about what’s happening, but not quite enough”. At the end, you do know what you need to know before the game explicitly tells you. Information is presented in the right doses, at the right moments.

• I really loved the objectiveness of the dialog. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of trying to come off as the superwriter, and fill the dialogs with a bunch of useless lines and pointless information. This does not happen here. Player and NPC dialogs feel very fluid and natural, but at the same time, they tell you all you need to know.

• Related to the item above, there’s no useless item interaction. If you interact with an item and it gives you information, you can be sure it’s useful information. No such thing as “what a pretty vase”.

• The initial investigation system is also clear and engaging. You have two types of evidence: material ones (like finding relevant objects), and informative ones (testimonials from the witnesses). When talking to a witness, you can either discuss relevant topics, or ask information on one of your items/evidences. That’s how you get clues.

• The music was expertly selected. I really loved the first theme that plays inside the house.

I didn’t like

• I just can’t let it pass: the mapping of this game is horrible. It’s not that mapping should matter much in a game like this, but it’s so awful that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. The problem is not just that it’s strange and weird with all these misplaced objects like chairs facing pointless directions and papers on top of shelves, but that sometimes it gives the wrong impression... for instance, a lot of maps have open bottles spilling on the floor, or books lying on the floor that lead you to believe that some sort of mess was made there. But in fact, there wasn’t any mess, there’s no ingame reason why that room shouldn’t be completely tidy.

• My biggest disappointment was finding out that the game is 100% linear, that there’s really no choice to be made, and no challenge in solving the mystery. In the final parts of the game, you’re requested to select a certain set of evidence to support your conclusions. If you don’t select the exact clues the game expects you to, it will just tell you “no, that’s not the one” and have you select again. That is, you can’t actually fail the game. If you can’t fail a game, you also can’t win, just finish it. The way the ending was handled completely destroyed my sense of achievement. I mean, I was thinking hard to find out who did it, but the way the game mechanics was designed, you can finish the game even if you don’t speak English. That was a downer.
  I’m not sure what could be an alternative to that, though. Maybe if the player have some sort of score that would decrease each time he made a wrong guess? So that the player would “win” anyway (because a gameover would be just too frustrating), but with a higher score if he was more competent in solving the crime.
  I also felt a little bit of guessing-required at some of the final moments. The game asked me “which evidence supports this?”, and sometimes, logically, more than one evidence supported it, but the game would only accept one. It was not a huge problem, because if you got it wrong, you could select another one. But it was slightly punishing, as “getting it wrong” can be interpreted by “you don’t really understand what’s going on”... but I did!
  
  What I’m saying is... an investigation game that’s badly written won’t engage you in trying to solve its mysteries, because you’ll quickly realize it’s just not possible (unless you can read the developer’s mind). Happy Birthday is incredibly well written, though, and because of that, it is very engaging. It makes your mind work very hard to find out what’s going on, and it’s rewarding in the way that the story actually makes sense if you think about it. That’s why the guessing factor of its last bits were something of a downer.

It’s still a great game. I’d recommend it to everyone who likes detective stories, and I really hope TearsOfNightfall will make more of these games, cause that’s clearly his talent. They don’t have to be sequels (story-linked), just something in the same structure.