Erstwhile

It was a pretty good Thanksgiving until you keeled over and died.

Now that is what I call a killer opening line. Of course it turns out to be murder, and we, as a ghost, are our own detective. We're able to enter the minds of our suspects and pick up on those lingering surface memories that are relevant to us and our situations. Then, by combining clues together, we can get deeper into the story and finally figure out whodunnit -- possessing them briefly to make them confess to the crime.

It's not the first time the idea of combining clues to form deductions has been used, but it's the first time I've seen it done with Twine. It works really well. One of the issues with Twine as a vehicle for whodunnits is, I think, the ease by which one might steamroll through every available link; this puzzle system requires us to think about what we've learned and try to make sense out of it ourselves. I rather think that this may be the preferred form of puzzling in mystery stories from here on out.

And of course, there's the design that has to go into this, to make sure we find everything we need before we can latch onto the truth ... not to mention account for all the possible orders in which we might encounter the pieces of information. The drama of the situation emerges quite deliciously, each morsel of information making us hunger for more, which is exactly how a mystery story should work.

One interesting point of note is that the motive for the murder is not exactly an essential point when it comes to figuring out the murderer. In fact, our protagonist wilfully refuses to acknowledge as relevant those clues that might point to the actual motive -- even though, as noted, the nature of possession means that every clue found must be relevant. (Quite realistically, our protagonist refuses to accept responsibility or admit that he might not be a very nice person after all.) There is, therefore, a tantalising nebula of speculation formed here: we can guess at what happened, but it's never explicitly stated.

I think that if this were a breakfast, it would be a crepe stuffed with slices of roast turkey breast, bechamel sauce, cheese, and chives, with apples and peaches and melon on the side. Oh, and a hazelnut roast coffee. Full marks for a balance of flavour.