This month we talk about A Case of Distrust.
Four adventure games in a row. This one was Nick’s suggestion as I had never heard of it before. It was a stylish looking text-based 1920’s noir adventure game.
The most interesting aspect of the game is the taxicabs you take from one location to another. Every time you can have a conversation with the driver. It’s all optional, but it adds so much texture to the world and as we note in the podcast, so relevant to current day America. The writing was so meaty that I copied down a bunch of them for quoting material. None of it is relevant to the main investigation, which allows those conversations to be much more wide ranging. It’s a worldbuilding tool I hope other games pick up.
As for our discussion, it feels like a lot of it was about the quirks and design nature of adventure games. The rest was about the quirks and design nature of detective fiction. On a fundamental level, the game makes you feel like a detective, so it is successful to that degree.
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“’Poetic Franky,’ I countered. ‘But this only proves you had no faith in me. Just like Green, who hired me, because he thought I wouldn’t see through his scheme. Or his wife, who was hoping I would gum up the works for the police. You though I couldn’t hold my own. I’m just some flapper, playing in a man’s world. Is that right?”