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Okay, I had a plan for this to come out two days ago as a nice Halloween-themed special episode. But my utter non-interest in finishing what turned out to be the last ten minutes of this game meant I procrastinated, so here we are. Given that this is a murder mystery, I’ll do my best to get my thoughts out mechanics-wise without spoiling too much of the story (though I will be forced to talk about one thing in the very last part of the game which is kinda-sorta spoiler-related, though it is a spoiler more about the mechanics than the plot).
The Painscreek Killings (TPK, which I find more amusing than I should as a GM) starts out by declaring that it is attempting to be an emulation of investigating a cold case murder. You are dropped on the outskirts of an abandoned town and told you are there to get answers to three questions: Who killed Vivian Roberts, how, and why? You are also told to keep extensive notes or to use the in-game camera.
I tend to play these sorts of games in as few sittings as possible, since keeping a mental model of all the clues and red herrings you run across takes quite a bit of brain-RAM and once I take a break many details will get muddled. Sure, I keep notes and pictures on my iPad (how else do you remember the dozens of combinations you run across), but unless I were an actual detective I can’t bring myself to make a cork-board with red strings.
There are three axes I think we should evaluate TPK on: the mechanics, the clues, and – of course – the mystery itself. Starting with the mechanics, I found myself thinking back to Quern upon many occasions. In essence, TPK is a point-and-click adventure game. You go from place to place, picking up keys (so…many…keys) and using them on the locks they are labeled for. You read the backstory on notes in the environment, and you spend far too much time pixel hunting (or, since this is a 3D environment, finding hitboxes and interactable items amongst the clutter). TPK has slightly more reason to be 3D than Quern did, since the immersive quality of the town of Painscreek relies on it – though the town did become a lot smaller once I realized that only the doors that have locks on them will ever be unlockable. All in all, the town is a good start – one you can become more familiar with over time and learning its secrets.
The way you go about learning those secrets, unfortunately, is where TPK begins to falter. An open-world investigation game is always going to be very, very difficult to get right. Being able to attack a problem from literally any angle is great in theory, but I can’t even imagine how you ensure a game like that feels satisfactory as a designer. I may be forgetting one somewhere, but to my knowledge this has only been done successfully once – in Outer Wilds. Part of my joy in video games recently has been to watch other people play Outer Wilds: not just because it’s the only way to somewhat recapture the original feeling, but because the way people approach problems can be so radically different and yet the game still “works.” I find it hilarious every time a player goes somewhere, finds something, and says something along the lines of “well, this must be where the developer expected you to go first” (or how often a player will look in just the right direction they expected you to anyway – there’s a video essay somewhere talking about how Outer Wilds sometimes teaches you three different things just by opening a door).
But back to TPK. Unfortunately (though typically for point-and-click style games), most content is gated behind keys. So many keys. At least they’re labeled with hints on your inventory screen (it took me way too long to realized that, which would have made remembering what they were all for quite a bit easier). And, amusingly, I can say with confidence that the game would be better without them. Why do I say that? Well, about halfway through the game, I stopped finding keys almost entirely. Without more keys, there were no new areas to explore and most of my lines of inquiry dried up. Progress was slow, but I eventually solved the mystery (other than finding definitive proof about the murder weapon). It was difficult, but eventually I gave up and left town with what I had learned. The end screen told me I had completed 50% and said my conclusions were wrong (well, I got a letter from a “concerned citizen” asking if I was sure about my conclusions and was graded an “Amateur”). Since I was pretty confident (and confused how I missed half the game), I started going through a guide, checking off the stuff I had done.
And, as it turns out, I had missed something. A random key in a random closet to a cabin. Now, I had looked in that closet, but I had missed the key since I was more interested in the notes (and since I was taking my own notes, I never returned). So I took that key to the cabin and started following this trail of keys. And, truly, I have never felt so overwhelmed with keys in a video game. That key lead to more keys. Which lead to more keys. Which lead to even more keys. I once opened a container and there were three keys just sitting there, alongside a note which told me absolutely nothing I didn’t already know. At that moment, I sighed and sank back in my chair, wondering why I was bothering.
This whole sequence, which lead straight to the end of the game, felt depressingly linear and told me almost nothing I hadn’t already figured out from the clues they had already given me. There is one side murder (and a whole fake twist) which hadn’t come up in my previous investigations, but as far as the main story went, I learned very little (other than that the in-game private investigator’s idea of a “corner” is not quite the same as mine). The townsfolk apparently also left all of their incriminating evidence written down in black-and-white English, just in case you might have missed the clues pointing towards their involvements in one of the crimes. That pattern continued right up until I found a tape recorder from the murderer literally confessing exactly how and why they did everything – which felt a bit on the nose.
It’s at this point why you might be wondering why I would choose this as my Halloween horror game. Well, up to this point, I was as well. When I had been pitched this game, I was told it had horror elements – but other than the power going out in a building at one point during the game (which I chalked up to simply a fuse blowing due to my presence – ironically, very horror movie protagonist of me) I had encountered nothing that felt horror-adjacent – the murder happened years ago and the town was empty.
That is, until I listened to that tape recorder. At that point, the game transitions to an “escape the murderer” run across town. Why the murderer came back at that precise moment, how they managed to lock almost all the doors in town, or why they stop for 10 seconds after attacking you once is left unexplained (then again, they also left a tape recorder with all their crimes sitting in an unlocked drawer).
At first, this concept interested me: you’ve spent hours walking around this town, and now you’re forced to find your path around the newly-locked doors and juke the murderer before you, hopefully, escape. But no – the path is once again quite linear, takes you through a section I had visited only once before (and so had very little memory of it), and has a ghost pointing you the correct way until you finish the game. …Oh right, the ghost. Turns out, there’s a ghost. Now, once again apropos of a horror protagonist, I had somehow missed every single instance of that ghost showing up before the denouement (looking later, I realized I was literally looking down at my iPad to write a note in one instance – it truly was just bad timing on my part).
The game ends after this brief run across town, and it turned out my original conclusions from several hours previous were correct (I had even previously correctly guessed the murder weapon based on a coroner’s report). Hence this entire deviation to talk about how the game would be better without keys – the clues themselves support the story and lead you to the correct conclusions without needing it spelled out for you. The story itself isn’t a bad one (though a few points seemed a bit contrived just to make the twists harder to guess), and it left me feeling clever…several hours before the game ended. I just hope the newspaper appreciates that I chose a photo of the ghost over the killer chasing me with an axe for the front page (they don’t disable your camera during that last run, so I got some good pictures both running backwards and capturing what I can only imagine is that world’s confirmation of the existence of ghosts).
Honestly, I’m not entirely certain where to tier this one. My initial instinct was Tier Two, since I did enjoy the mystery and am always a sucker for point-and-click adventure games (which this is, at least spiritually). But while I enjoyed learning the story and my brain has already started ironing out the rough spots in my memory, I can’t say that it was truly worth finishing, particularly given the linear nature of the second half. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t have gone back to finish it this morning had I not wanted to write this article. Tier Three feels low, but it’s at least a very high Tier Three.