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I killed the Butler
Kylaila- 03/15/2016 08:23 AM
- 2006 views
"Someone Killed the Butler" is a short mystery game with a light-hearted touch, with roughly half an hour or less playtime.
It has a couple of major flaws, but it manages to be a fun little experience and allows you to guess what is going on rather than having it revealed to you.
You are a detective. You were ordered to a rich peoples' mansion to find out the culprit behind the murder of an innocent butler. We do not know who the butler was in particular, but he is neatly placed in his own pool of blood.
The murder is only taken half-seriously. If you mess up your final deduction you are even straight out fired without anyone chiming in, or voicing any doubts. The way you traverse the house, and the inability to cooporate (a maid is straighout blocking the way), are all very odd, although in the game-logic explainable and okay.
What this game does is that while a lot of things do not make sense, most of them seem unimportant in figuring out what happened, and while the very end was more of a Detective Conan moment of every last piece magically falling into place, the majority is very sensible and logical enough to deduce yourself.
There are two major suspects, which are easy to tell apart, and could easily have been a little bit more difficult to follow than it is. You can still pin the blame to anyone, including a poor scared little girl, which I found downright hilarious!
The monologue / choice description easily could have been shorter, however, as it is a little bit of a too obvious get-away of what is going to happen. Just "seriously" accusing her without any big spoiler or dialogue would have made it a tad easier.
It really is the game-mystery type of mystery. Not really serious - you are mentioning how hungry you are getting on numerous occasions - not completely logical, but perfectly expected and within the boundries of what you expect a rich family to be in an artifical stereotyped setting.
And food. Lots of food. Oh, I love food.
Tea will never be the same after that consent video. I love it.
Features!
First of all, there is a very clean menu - you can save, you can view the list of clues/evidence and suspects, you can combine the clues for some additional musings on them, and you can start randomly accusing someone, because you need to first start with who did it before you say why!
Before you start out you can select an avatar from a few, and type in your name! I really liked that you could type it directly, rather than the slow letter-for-letter selection.
Anyway, sadly, the combining facts menu is despite the nice layout a little iffy to work with, as there are only very few combinations that will wield you results, none of which are all that useful. I expected something with the "heavy sleeper" note to pop up (as - if someone has a deep sleep, stuff around them can happen without them necessarily noticing), but while you logically draw that conclusion instantly, you cannot do so in the notes.
However, they are completely optional and I really, really liked that fact because getting the EXACT TWO WORDS together you want to have, when you already have long figured out the logical implications in a bigger context, is a real pain to deal with. It actually is what nulled any potential fun I could have had in the one Ace Attorney game I played, because while I already figured it all out, it was a pain to get the exact combination at the exact moment to procceed gameplay-wise.
Ignore the combining notes, and you are better off as it is right now.
Similarily, you can ask the family residing there a lot of questions - regarding family members and pieces of evidence. There are a few short lines of flavor text, a few vital clues, and lots of empty "no comment" space.
I realize they were added to lessen the impact of what some hints may be, so that it appears less obvious starting out, but you spend a lot of time pressing through empty lines, which clogs of quite a bit of your gametime without any fun to be had.
The bigger part of the investigation is, rather than asking around, looking around the house and getting to the mysteriously blocked room to sneak around for clues.
There are quite a few you can easily miss if you aren't thorough, and I quite enjoyed that fact.
At the same time you know there ought to be more out there, so you are encouraged to do so.
Other things!
The RTP is well-used in a compact building.. it appears a little unrealistic for a really rich family to have rooms directly connected to one another. It seems lacking of the usual privacy a big house can offer to the people living in there.
Otherwise, it represents well what is going on. Bare the riches, but food and maids and cooks beat all jewelry every time.
The music choices are very odd. The standard music is the RTP happy-adventure-time music which quickly gets annoying even when used right, and is completely off for a murder taking place. It says sunshine and rainbows, rather than tense atmosphere and murders. It does, however, make way for the light-hearted tone that is mixed in. I am not sure whether that is particularily good or bad as an entry to a murder mystery.
The piano-loving guy playing sounds horrible. I don't know what tune that is, but I would not call it beautiful in any way. My character disagrees. Everyone disagrees.
The standard RTP tunes or inn melodies would already have done and given it a nice fun edge to boot.
Apparantly synthetic fabric isn't burning well. Color me suprised.
I wonder what leather counts as.
There is a timer at the end. It sets up some tension, but whyever a detective should have a time limit to explain or demonstrate things remains a mystery. Still, it is there and works in our lovely artificial setting!
I love that the butler could have killed the butler.
I really wasn't sure whether to give this 3 or 2.5 stars. But the gameplay-holes made me go down.
All in all:
This is a little bit of quirky game. It works well for sneaking around and piecing together what happened on your own - and that is awesome!
There are a couple of unnecessary fillers mixed in, and the atmosphere is a humorous-mystery mix.
It is an enjoyable run!
It has a couple of major flaws, but it manages to be a fun little experience and allows you to guess what is going on rather than having it revealed to you.
You are a detective. You were ordered to a rich peoples' mansion to find out the culprit behind the murder of an innocent butler. We do not know who the butler was in particular, but he is neatly placed in his own pool of blood.
The murder is only taken half-seriously. If you mess up your final deduction you are even straight out fired without anyone chiming in, or voicing any doubts. The way you traverse the house, and the inability to cooporate (a maid is straighout blocking the way), are all very odd, although in the game-logic explainable and okay.
What this game does is that while a lot of things do not make sense, most of them seem unimportant in figuring out what happened, and while the very end was more of a Detective Conan moment of every last piece magically falling into place, the majority is very sensible and logical enough to deduce yourself.
There are two major suspects, which are easy to tell apart, and could easily have been a little bit more difficult to follow than it is. You can still pin the blame to anyone, including a poor scared little girl, which I found downright hilarious!
The monologue / choice description easily could have been shorter, however, as it is a little bit of a too obvious get-away of what is going to happen. Just "seriously" accusing her without any big spoiler or dialogue would have made it a tad easier.
You are automatically on her due to the hostility towards Aster. It even gets its own note - leaving that out would actually have made it a possibility as well. Or just having her focus on her daughter without noting more about it.
It really is the game-mystery type of mystery. Not really serious - you are mentioning how hungry you are getting on numerous occasions - not completely logical, but perfectly expected and within the boundries of what you expect a rich family to be in an artifical stereotyped setting.
And food. Lots of food. Oh, I love food.
Tea will never be the same after that consent video. I love it.
Features!
First of all, there is a very clean menu - you can save, you can view the list of clues/evidence and suspects, you can combine the clues for some additional musings on them, and you can start randomly accusing someone, because you need to first start with who did it before you say why!
Before you start out you can select an avatar from a few, and type in your name! I really liked that you could type it directly, rather than the slow letter-for-letter selection.
Anyway, sadly, the combining facts menu is despite the nice layout a little iffy to work with, as there are only very few combinations that will wield you results, none of which are all that useful. I expected something with the "heavy sleeper" note to pop up (as - if someone has a deep sleep, stuff around them can happen without them necessarily noticing), but while you logically draw that conclusion instantly, you cannot do so in the notes.
However, they are completely optional and I really, really liked that fact because getting the EXACT TWO WORDS together you want to have, when you already have long figured out the logical implications in a bigger context, is a real pain to deal with. It actually is what nulled any potential fun I could have had in the one Ace Attorney game I played, because while I already figured it all out, it was a pain to get the exact combination at the exact moment to procceed gameplay-wise.
Ignore the combining notes, and you are better off as it is right now.
Similarily, you can ask the family residing there a lot of questions - regarding family members and pieces of evidence. There are a few short lines of flavor text, a few vital clues, and lots of empty "no comment" space.
I realize they were added to lessen the impact of what some hints may be, so that it appears less obvious starting out, but you spend a lot of time pressing through empty lines, which clogs of quite a bit of your gametime without any fun to be had.
The bigger part of the investigation is, rather than asking around, looking around the house and getting to the mysteriously blocked room to sneak around for clues.
There are quite a few you can easily miss if you aren't thorough, and I quite enjoyed that fact.
At the same time you know there ought to be more out there, so you are encouraged to do so.
Other things!
The RTP is well-used in a compact building.. it appears a little unrealistic for a really rich family to have rooms directly connected to one another. It seems lacking of the usual privacy a big house can offer to the people living in there.
Otherwise, it represents well what is going on. Bare the riches, but food and maids and cooks beat all jewelry every time.
The music choices are very odd. The standard music is the RTP happy-adventure-time music which quickly gets annoying even when used right, and is completely off for a murder taking place. It says sunshine and rainbows, rather than tense atmosphere and murders. It does, however, make way for the light-hearted tone that is mixed in. I am not sure whether that is particularily good or bad as an entry to a murder mystery.
The piano-loving guy playing sounds horrible. I don't know what tune that is, but I would not call it beautiful in any way. My character disagrees. Everyone disagrees.
The standard RTP tunes or inn melodies would already have done and given it a nice fun edge to boot.
Apparantly synthetic fabric isn't burning well. Color me suprised.
I wonder what leather counts as.
There is a timer at the end. It sets up some tension, but whyever a detective should have a time limit to explain or demonstrate things remains a mystery. Still, it is there and works in our lovely artificial setting!
I love that the butler could have killed the butler.
I really wasn't sure whether to give this 3 or 2.5 stars. But the gameplay-holes made me go down.
All in all:
This is a little bit of quirky game. It works well for sneaking around and piecing together what happened on your own - and that is awesome!
There are a couple of unnecessary fillers mixed in, and the atmosphere is a humorous-mystery mix.
It is an enjoyable run!
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CloseOnce again, thank you very much for taking the time to review this game! You certainly do pop up a lot, and with the possibly hundreds of RM games you must've reviewed at this point, I value your feedback immensely.
Since this review, the timer has been fixed and Jane has become available for idle chatter (she doesn't say anything important, so no reports of this had reached me until I watched a couple let's plays to gauge player reactions). Jane was unavailable previously due to my failure as a developer to call the "Question Jane Doe" common event in her event page... careless, careless mistakes.
Moving on. The only maps included were the essential ones, so if a room existed, it existed for some purpose or another. The rest of the manor is presumably closed off. This was mainly to give myself time to write everything out rather than focusing very much on expanding the house into rooms that the player would never need to see.
It was rather difficult to find something between too easy and too hard, so I erred on the side of the obvious, as I didn't want players to become frustrated with the game. I tried to keep the game as open as possible, mainly that you could accuse anyone at any time once you had the bare basics of the case down, and maintain that sense of openness by allowing the player to ask about virtually anything. (You had suggested that I limit choices to only the relevant few bits of evidence, but I modeled the questioning after Ace Attorney Investigations, where generic dialogue occurs when evidence that is irrelevant to the person being asked is presented). I chose this mechanic for investigations because the player doesn't feel restricted)
But all in all, I'm glad you liked it! Thanks for playing~
edit: I did not know what consent tea was, and now I do xD I should really stop my habit of googling things that I see mentioned on the internet, it could've been worse
Since this review, the timer has been fixed and Jane has become available for idle chatter (she doesn't say anything important, so no reports of this had reached me until I watched a couple let's plays to gauge player reactions). Jane was unavailable previously due to my failure as a developer to call the "Question Jane Doe" common event in her event page... careless, careless mistakes.
Moving on. The only maps included were the essential ones, so if a room existed, it existed for some purpose or another. The rest of the manor is presumably closed off. This was mainly to give myself time to write everything out rather than focusing very much on expanding the house into rooms that the player would never need to see.
It was rather difficult to find something between too easy and too hard, so I erred on the side of the obvious, as I didn't want players to become frustrated with the game. I tried to keep the game as open as possible, mainly that you could accuse anyone at any time once you had the bare basics of the case down, and maintain that sense of openness by allowing the player to ask about virtually anything. (You had suggested that I limit choices to only the relevant few bits of evidence, but I modeled the questioning after Ace Attorney Investigations, where generic dialogue occurs when evidence that is irrelevant to the person being asked is presented). I chose this mechanic for investigations because the player doesn't feel restricted)
But all in all, I'm glad you liked it! Thanks for playing~
edit: I did not know what consent tea was, and now I do xD I should really stop my habit of googling things that I see mentioned on the internet, it could've been worse
Aww, thank you! That means a lot.
On my end, I really enjoy playing and reviewing your games because you really handle feedback well. Makes it much more fun for me! (and your games are right up my alley, too!) So kudos to you :)
Aye, it's all very utilitarian.
I can definitely see why you chose the approach, and it's why I found it difficult to critize it for that reason. It keeps a perceived equality of all pieces of evidence and opinions, because you can ask for them all. It keeps the options open - but then because you need to go through all of them, practically, to reach a few vital clues, and it soon becomes rather tedious when little flavor text is actually there.
I think it's a good choice, but sadly underdeveloped making it a lil annoying.
Also, I appreciate that it is a little bit on the easy side. Especially with the comedy influence, the main enjoyment is not just the mystery. There still is a lot of room for your own thoughts and logic before you pick up every last piece of evidence, so I like that. It still makes you feel smart, and that's a goal worth striving for.
Gotcha. I'll edit the timer thing out/in.
If you do end up adding a couple more features, give me a whirl so I can adjust accordingly.
I was almost tempted to not spell the joke out, so I commend your curiosity. Tea is awesome.
On my end, I really enjoy playing and reviewing your games because you really handle feedback well. Makes it much more fun for me! (and your games are right up my alley, too!) So kudos to you :)
Aye, it's all very utilitarian.
I can definitely see why you chose the approach, and it's why I found it difficult to critize it for that reason. It keeps a perceived equality of all pieces of evidence and opinions, because you can ask for them all. It keeps the options open - but then because you need to go through all of them, practically, to reach a few vital clues, and it soon becomes rather tedious when little flavor text is actually there.
I think it's a good choice, but sadly underdeveloped making it a lil annoying.
Also, I appreciate that it is a little bit on the easy side. Especially with the comedy influence, the main enjoyment is not just the mystery. There still is a lot of room for your own thoughts and logic before you pick up every last piece of evidence, so I like that. It still makes you feel smart, and that's a goal worth striving for.
Gotcha. I'll edit the timer thing out/in.
If you do end up adding a couple more features, give me a whirl so I can adjust accordingly.
I was almost tempted to not spell the joke out, so I commend your curiosity. Tea is awesome.
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