2.2 hours played
Written 3 years ago
"Murder Diaries" is a short narrative game that, unfortunately, fails at almost everything it tries to do. As someone who loves narrative games (and plays a lot of them), I would regard this one mostly as a waste of time and money.
The story is so short and pointless that it's impossible to talk about it without "spoiling" anything, but it's also so predictable that I don't think knowing the plot changes anything for potential players. There is no revelation, no twist, and no attempt to make the story even remotely interesting. So here's the synopsis: It's about a young man who grows up under difficult circumstances, sees his father and brother getting killed by rival gangs, and then meticulously plans his revenge and eventually murders the killer. That is literally the entire story, there's nothing more to it.
This story is narrated to you by the protagonist itself in 200 voiced lines that are drip-fed to you, with pauses after each line, over the course of 2 hours. Most of these lines are incredibly mundane and boring. The protagonist tells us in excruciating detail which food the victim ate every friday, what kind of clothes he wore on the day of the reckoning, what kind of fighting styles and moves the victim preferred (not that it matters in any way for the final "fight"), and more. All this is narrated in a slow-speaking voice that is bereft of any emotion. This laconic style might fit the character, but does not create an engaging or interesting story. It's just two hours of (mostly boring) dread.
The developers claim boldly that this is "an intriguing story unlike you have ever seen before". Well, If you have literally lived under a rock for the past 40 years, then that may indeed be the case. If not, then you'll probably agree that the trope "murder story told from the perspective of the killer" is hardly a new thing.
Since this is sold as a game, let's talk about the gameplay. We are witnessing an amazing symmetry of form and function here, as the gameplay is exactly as pointless and boring as the story: You are flying slowly through various 3D spaces and have to pass through 200 hoops.
This is not a joke. That is literally the entire gameplay.
Each time you fly through a hoop, you are "rewarded" with another vapid line from the narrator, and the next hoop appears. You never see any hoops beyond the very next one, so you cannot plan your path ahead. New hoops may appear close to you and in your field of view, or behind you, or somewhere else, obstructed by the scenery. In case of the latter, you may have to slowly, slowly fly around for a minute or longer until you finally spot it. It's noteworthy that you also cannot just look around, as there is no camera control, the camera just follows you. So if you want to take a look behind you, you have to slowly, slowly turn around and wait for the camera to follow you. Then you slowly, slowly move a bit to the sides to get a better view, because the default perspective is very myopic. If you want to peek behind an obstacle, you have to slowly, slowly approach, then slowly, slowly dive behind it, and then slowly, slowly get back - all the while taking care to never touch anything, because that immediately respawns you at the location of the last hoop you passed.
While flying through a beautiful and/or imaginative scenery can be entertaining (even if you have to do it veeeery sloooowly), the environments in Murder Diaries are without exception shoddy, low-effort creations with blurry, low-fidelity textures even at the so-called "ultra quality" setting. Most of the scenes are so dark that you can't see any details, which probably isn't a great loss because there aren't any - but it's a great source of fun when you respawn in a black space and have no idea where to fly to until you hit the next pitch-black wall and respawn again. That said, you'll occasionally hit obstacles (or miss hoops) even when the lighting is decent, because you don't have a shadow, so it's sometimes difficult to gauge your exact distance from an object. You can't look very far either, because most scenes are drowned in red, green, or blue fog.
To be fair, some of the scenes _do_ show some imagination and have a surreal touch that could, with more effort, have grown into something worth experiencing. But this is outweighed by other scenes that really aren't worth exploring at all. Look, a bathtub! Oh hey, here's an alley with a lamppost, and here's another, and here's even yet another one! Wow, here's a chair! And so on ...
While the graphics are deplorably bad, and sound effects are almost non-existent, the music is probably one of the game's strongest suits. Bow instruments, a piano, and vocalizations from a choir create a carpet of emotions that is sorely absent from the story, and the piece ends with a rock ballad e-guitar that comes across as really powerful after the mostly sad tunes that precede it.
It's hard to say anything about the voice-acting. It's mostly just forgettable, but I think the lack of emotions is by design of the story. I think the voice actor competently embodied a pretty boring character whose emotions have been drowned out by a cold, methodical desire for revenge. It's not the actor's fault that the character wasn't interesting.
Let's have a look at accessibility features next - how important was the user experience to these developers? Considering the low effort that went into all other aspects of this game, the answer is, unsurprisingly, "not much". You cannot even control your flight with the mouse - only the keyboard works, and movement is fixed to the WASD and arrow keys, without a way to rebind them. At least you can tweak the sensitivity of the input, as well as invert the y-axis. There are exactly two graphics options: A resolution selector, and a "quality" setting with 6 presets that all look terrible. Of course the game doesn't bother with superfluous luxury settings like a brightness slider - I mean, why would anyone want to actually _see_ the graphics in all their ugliness? The audio options consist of separate volume sliders for music, effects, and master volume (voice is notably absent here). The game displays subtitles, but they cannot be tweaked or switched off. No other options exist. At all.
The game consists of 16 "chapters", and whenever you complete one (as in, flew through all the hoops in one), the next chapter unlocks. You cannot save your progress within a chapter (obviously that would have been too much effort to code ...), but your chapter unlocks are saved automatically. There's a "chapter select" function that lets you replay any chapter you want, but I honestly don't think you'd want to.
While I did not run into any gameplay bugs, I did notice that my mouse pointer was somewhere on the screen all the time, constantly reminding me of how useful it would be to have actual mouse controls in this game. At least it did not crash, which is something, I guess. On the other hand, none of the achievements ever triggered for me.
So, do I recommend this game? Hardly. It's a minimal-effort attempt at a narrative-focused game with paltry gameplay, similar to what Dear Esther did, but with a completely linear story. Unfortunately, this does not work when the story is dreadful, the environments are ugly, the one gameplay mechanic is mind-numbingly boring, and standard usability/accessibility features are completely absent.
I usually try to find something redeeming in the games I review, something that allows me to recommend it to at least some small part of the audience. But in this case, I just can't, and I don't really want to. If developers _so_ obviously put next to no effort into a product that they want to see 10€ for, then even I don't feel obligated to find an audience for it. Perhaps, if you really really loved the lack of gameplay in Dear Esther, but found its non-linear storytelling confusing, then Murder Diaries might be worth a shot when it's 80% off.
