Mystery of the Malign
And I would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for my own obsessive note-taking!
Mystery of the Malign leapt from the shadows and shoved itself down my throat via the June Steam Next Fest event. I played the demo and knew by the end I’d be picking up the full game at release - it was unique in a way few games of similar quality are, and successfully teased a wider adventure to come. The game came out about a week ago, and I found myself digging into it obsessively for several days, desperate to pick apart every secret and loose end.
MotM is a first-person adventure game where you play as a freelance investigator chasing a lead on a suspicious assault case. The game is set in an alternate world that superficially resembles Britain of the the 1950s, and some of the details of its history are revealed as the case unfolds, as do the details of your character and his team. For the most part, you walk around quite slowly, examine suspicious items and scuff marks, and interrogate everyone you can get in front of about everything you’ve ever seen or heard of. Literally everything. Multiple times!
You can technically complete the game just by getting to the point where you’re taken against your will to the third chapter and doing a few things there, but the real goal of the game is to make sense of the events, and to do that, you are expected to complete the Case files. These documents are a central part of your menus, and are vaguely worded formats for you to plug key words and names into like a Mad Lib. It’s a bit like the insurance form you fill out in Return of the Obra Dinn except with more variety and more interesting conclusions to draw than figuring out each person’s real name. Some pages are simple timelines of important moments for each event, some are lists of individuals or objects involved, and others are essentially narrative summaries. There are ten to complete to see the ‘true’ ending, and it’s more complicated than you might be imagining.
Most of the game takes place in and around the Goddard Public Museum, a small but well-appointed gallery of ancient artifacts, from spearheads to large stone tablets. The whole building, including the surrounding grounds, wouldn’t be particularly impressive in any other game, but the level of detail and variety of subtle clues to find mean that I spent, over the course of two runs, over 15 hours just in and around this one two-story building. Along with all of the displays and clues obviously relevant to your case, there’s a shocking amount of incidental text, little nuances you might not pick up your first dozen times down a hallway, and of course, several NPCs just trying to do their jobs while you circle around and find new bits of lint or suspicious detritus to pester them about.
The interrogation is central to the game, and it’s extremely well done. Though most people have little or nothing to say about most topics, it’s always logically consistent, and they often surprise you with little tidbits about things you bring up with few expectations. But when they do get to talking, it’s worth paying careful attention - NPCs can provide direct clarifying information, subtle hints to push you towards a conclusion, or even clue you in on totally new leads. And, just as often, they can be intentionally evasive, lie by omission, or blow you off entirely. The game makes a careful point in the tutorial to hammer home that you shouldn’t take everyone’s every word as gospel - as a serious investigator, you have to leave open the possibility of lies, subterfuge, faulty memories, and misunderstandings to taint the veracity of witness statements. That’s not to say that everyone is always lying about everything, but MotM is one of the games I’ve played that pulls off the balance with a true narrative flair that keeps the story compelling.
Unfortunately, the interrogation is also where the game’s flaws start to rear their heads, and most of these problems stem from the intentionally retro and somewhat cumbersome user interface. When you start the game, clicking on the topic button and picking something to ask about is clunky, but fine. After you poke around for an hour or so, the list of available topics swells to the point where meeting a new NPC can feel like a chore, as you now have to click-click-click-click to scroll through each page of shoeprints, types of dirt, dead or retired colleagues, loud noises, and on and on to get their take on everything. Once you’ve started really combing through the grounds, even the ability to filter the topics to objects only, for example, ceases to really do much to cut the impact on your carpel tunnel down from Diablo 2 levels.
The UI woes abound if you decide to try for 100% completion. One quirk that threw me for a loop, already exhausted in the middle of the night as I’d been groping around the grim, dark basement, is that one of the Case Scenes for the first case is actually hidden on a second page, with the context shading to turn the page subtle enough that I’d completely missed it, and I can definitely see some people ripping their hair out wondering how to get it to show up. You can use items out of your inventory by double clicking them, and then interacting with something out in the world, and there are some really clever tricks the game pulls with this, as well as some nice quality of life things, like being able to get a physical copy of the museum’s inventory manifest and then rub it on any display to see its catalogue number rather than flipping through it manually. Once you have multiple keys, though, needing to pull up the inventory and cycle through every one of them to smash into a door that may or may not ever open is just as bad as the late-stage conversations.
You technically can go through your case file and tag any topic with appended notes manually, but this is itself a more cumbersome solution than just taking physical notes - I really wish there was an option for your in-game notes to show up when you hover over them in dialogue, for example, or some kind of pin-board screen where you can link things together with red string, like you can in Shadows of Doubt. I don’t personally mind taking physical notes, mind you - I actually really love it when a game forces me to take my hands off the controls and grab a pen out of frustration. But the game has enough clever touches already, and is not technically bound by true classic limitations, so I’d have liked to see more attempts to try better in-game implementation of such things.1
There was one particular essential clue that I got stuck on for multiple hours, only to realize that it is linked to examining the little imaginary ghosts that sometimes appear to ‘play out’ a certain event or scene once you’ve seen all the clues to come to a conclusion. It’s not enough for you to see all the clues… and it probably should be. I also got stuck in the very last chapter, which starts out with you deprived of your other menu items, and so the TAB key doesn’t do anything… and to open your inventory directly, you need to use another keypress that I hadn’t bothered with since the tutorial, and had forgotten existed.
The game has two major time jumps - one early on that can be manually committed to once you’ve unlocked it, and another that happens automatically if you pursue a certain confrontation. The problem is that the game presents the first one like it’s a serious point-of-no-return, but from what I can tell, although many things move around and change, you aren’t locked out of any clues essential for solving the core cases by doing so. The second one, on the other hand, locks you into the ending, and therefore out of getting full completion if you didn’t find every clue first. It’s just inconsistent, a little weird that you have control over the first at all [certain things happen and move around independent of the big time jump anyway, so it seems technically unnecessary] and worst of all, it can unnecessarily trick new players into banging their heads against things they can’t do or solve out of fear of advancing and missing out.
Finally, my greatest disappointment with the game is the ending - going out of your way, spending multiple extra hours trying to find and deduce every crumb of coherent context, and almost certainly replaying the early game on another file after stumbling into an early conclusion, and your reward is… a slightly different downer text at the end. Now, I’m not expecting anything breathtaking here… but even shitty NES games at least told you “CONGRATURATION.” I’d have loved to see a janky animated cutscene of some sort. I still think getting 100% completion under your own power is a reward of its own kind, but would it really have killed these devs to punch up the true ending the tiniest bit?
But the game more than makes up for all that with real atmosphere, a genuinely compelling story and setting, and characters that come to life completely absent any voice acting or animation, facial or otherwise. The 90s era 3D, the muddy textures and blobs of polygons snapping into focus as you examine a new item, the lack of background music, and the drip feeding of worldbuilding are all things that COULD be presented in an unflattering light, but come together to create one of the most engrossing adventure games I’ve ever played. Shuffling past a display case for the dozenth time, peering contemplatively at a shelf full of old pottery wondering if anything about them will jump out at me, tiptoeing through a dingy basement lit only by the flame of my lighter, realizing with a gasp that I can press a fresh sheet of blank paper onto a muddy footprint to get a physical piece of evidence, nothing else of this genre really sells the experience of being a snoop who’s really taking themselves seriously.
The way you learn about the world and the characters is also cleverly done - you have two partners, your friend David and wife Emely, and they take turns tagging along behind you or standing watch over the victim. At any point, you can ask either of them about any detail of the case, and it acts as a way for you to learn more about Christofer and the things that he knows, via him bouncing his thoughts off of two people very close to him. I don’t want to spoil any of the details of the worldbuilding and setting, but I will say that there’s so much potential to mine here I’d be willing to sacrifice a kidney to see a sequel.2
Mystery of the Malign is a remarkable game unlike almost anything else on the market. It’s a better mystery than Obra Dinn, it’s a better adventure game than… almost anything outside of LucasArts, and it’s a game with a dog that you don’t have a pointless context prompt to pet for the free space on your game journalist approval bingo card. It’s an incredibly slow burn, and not for everyone… it’s not for virtually anyone, really. But if you’re the kind of person who, like me, would lose track of time combing through two different versions of a museum inventory manifest, you absolutely must give it a shot.
Mystery of the Malign can be purchased on Steam.
The recent Prince of Persia metroidvania, The Lost Crown, has a special type of map pin that takes a screenshot of the location you’re noting for later, complete with a date and timestamp. I feel like almost every ‘puzzle’ or adventure game of this sort should just give you a camera that lets you keep and catalogue screenshots in a similar way.
And, from a tiny bit of screenshot you can spot in one of the tutorials, I strongly suspect the developer either made a different case before moving to the current one, or is planning to release a second game with the same base. It’d make perfect sense, with central characters mentioning prior cases often, and the ending leaves open the possibility for more in the future.