The Stack

I’ve been a little defensive about Clue Chronicles: Fatal Illusion, trying to see the best in it and focus on what it does right, so let me be completely clear: This is not a good game. Even starting from “It’s based on a board game IP”, I think it’s disappointing, because the story doesn’t involve all of the characters from the game in a satisfying way. By the end, the only ones that are at all relevant are Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet. I feel like what we have is a truncated version of a larger and more ambitious design with more murders in it.

But I can’t complain much about truncation, because it spares us more of the puzzles. I wound up seeking hints for three, and brute-forcing combinations on a fourth — that one being the game’s climactic puzzle, placing gems to match hieroglyphs. One placement, Miss Scarlet’s red gem to match “Nefer, the symbol of beauty”, seemed very clear, but who gets “Was – Sceptre, the symbol of power” and who gets “Bow – Junet, pedjet, used against the many enemies”? Also, I found that a lack of clarity in the graphics sometimes got in the way of proper solving. The game runs at 640×480, which would be easily enough to display the various symbols and diagrams in the game well if they were hand-drawn pixel art, but not with 1990s 3D models.

Speaking of 3D art, there are frequent problems with the animation, especially as it goes on. Movement animations frequently don’t match the still images; objects will disappear while you’re moving and reappear when you stop, and such. Sometimes you can see a still version of a character as part of the room image behind their animated self. There are a few animations that are swapped, so that pushing a lever right shows the animation of pushing it left and vice versa. Things like that. Things that clearly show that meeting a contractual deadline was top priority.

Every once in a while, someone at Hasbro decides that the reason people aren’t buying Clue as much as they used to is that it’s dated, and they try to modernize it. And it always seems like a mistake, because evoking the bygone era of Agatha Christie novels is part of the point. Clue Chronicles, to its merit, avoids this mistake, setting the whole thing shortly before the Second World War, and working that fact into some of the extra characters: one is rumored to be a German spy, another to be a Soviet spy. This is never expanded upon, and is irrelevant to the story. It’s all very well to have red herrings, but the international intrigue angle doesn’t even get enough attention to qualify as a distraction. It reminds me of certain tabletop role-playing campaigns I’ve been in, where people write backgrounds on their character sheets and then forget about them.

But it also supports the truncation theory. This really seems like a game whose initial design document far exceeded its budget. The initial concept was, after all, essentially budgetary: “We already have these character models built, so let’s use them again!” But then what do they do? Double the cast.

The boat chapter is followed by a short section where you have to get a cable car working to get up the mountain to Ian Masque’s castle. Once there, you’re cut off from the outside world, which would be ideal for additional murders, but there have been no additional murders yet. Instead, the story shunts off into a puzzle hunt. Each of the six standard Clue characters was, at some point in the past, given a riddle hinting at the location of a hidden gemstone. They’re all hopeless at riddles, though, and spend their time standing in one place instead of hunting through the castle, so it’s up to the player find all the gems for them.

The biggest obstacle to this is the navigation system. The movement model in this game is Myst-like, a set of fixed camera positions with hotspots to turn and move between them. And sometimes the obvious and direct way to get to somewhere isn’t supported. You’ll enter a room and see a character to your right as you enter, but they wind up off-camera. So you click to turn right, but it turns you too far, possibly 180 degrees. That character is only accessible if you’re standing on some other spot, and you just have to keep looking for movement hotspots until you chance upon it.

At any rate, the puzzle design in this chapter isn’t bad. You’ve got six simultaneous goals to pursue, with complications in many: one person can’t remember their riddle, another doesn’t trust you enough to share it, and so forth. The special abilities of the extra cast are useful here, as when you help Professor Plum recover his memories with the aid of a hypnotist. (Not that the hynotist can go to him personally — that would involve moving from one spot! — but she can at least teach hypnosis to you so you can do her job for her.) And once you solve a riddle and know where the gem is, there’s still some kind of self-contained adventure-game puzzle or minigame. My only real complaint is that one of the minigames is a Lights Out puzzle, which seems like filler.

Mr. Masque’s corpse, if it is in fact his, spends all this time stashed in a walk-in freezer. Meanwhile, another of the guests, a stage magician, is preparing to perform a trick called “Escape from Death”. You might think this would be in poor taste after their host dropped dead in front of everyone, but this is not the sort of story were people react to death in normal human ways. It wouldn’t take a lot to adjust the dialogue to make them more human — just make everyone acknowledge that the sudden presence of death is the reason no one’s in the mood for riddle-games! But that assumes priorities that aren’t in evidence for the designers or, most likely, the players.

The other day, some friends, who have been playing occasional board games online while unable to meet in person, decided to play Clue (aka Cluedo). I personally had never actually played Clue before, although I had seen the movie and was familiar with the characters and weapons. The computer adaptation we used is of course just the latest and most modern in a long line of adaptations, stretching back to a SNES release from 1992. The 1998 CD-ROM version for PC is of particular note for being the first game in the franchise to spawn a spin-off, Clue Chronicles: Fatal Illusion, a first-person adventure game that reuses its predecessor’s character models. Even though I had not yet played the board game when it came out, the idea of an adventure game based on a board game was novel enough to get me to purchase it probably a year or two after its release — although not enough to make me finish it.

Amazingly, it installs and runs without problems under Windows 10. As of this writing, I’ve played through the first chapter, which takes place on the boat taking the cast to a mysterious castle they’ve all been invited to. I think this is farther than I got on my first attempt, but that was about 20 years ago, so my memories are hazy.

It’s a slow-paced game, consisting of a lot of asking every character about every dialogue topic and certain amount of object puzzles, and as far as I’ve seen so far, not very concerned with detective work or deduction. There’s a very B-movie feel to it. Not just because of the dated-looking pre-rendered CGI, but because of the adventure-game unreality, the world of arbitrary illogic. Both contribute to a creeping sense of wrongness that actually fits the murder-house story pretty well. The game gives the usual Clue suspects backstories and relationships, but at the same time, none of them quite seem real. For the most part I’m choosing to let the strangeness just wash over me, Twin-Peaks-like, but it would be easy to choose to laugh at it instead. In fact, there was one moment that made me laugh out loud despite myself: in the intro cutscene, an unknown person opens a case to reveal all six canonical Clue weapons in molded insets. Yes, someone in this blatantly false world made a special carrying case for clearly improvised weapons like the wrench, candlestick, and lead pipe.

In addition to the various Professor Plums and Colonel Mustards and so forth, we get an assortment of early-20th-century magicians, occultists, and experts in the paranormal, all invited to a New Year’s Eve party by an eccentric antiquarian who gets killed before they even get off the boat. It seems likely that he won’t be the last victim, because what else are all these extra guests for? In fact, the obvious twist would be that he faked his death to escape blame when he starts slaughtering his guests. The biggest clue would be that his apparent death was caused by a booby-trapped puzzle box rather than by any of the six standard weapons in the case.

I’ve mentioned “field tokens” a few times, so let me explain what I mean. In every Gemcraft game except Labyrinth, battlefields are shown on the map as a sort of frame-like icon, usually in the same bulging triangle shape as a grade 1 gem. Gemcraft Chapter 0: Gem of Eternity, the second game, additionally used this frame to keep track of which play modes you had completed the field in, dividing it into segments and illuminating the ones completed. Chasing Shadows turned these indicators into glowing gems held within holes in the frame. But it also presented it as a literal token, a trinket that could be found in a locked chest or otherwise handed to you as part of your rewards on completing a level. How exactly a physical object grants you access to battlefields was left unexplained.

Chasing Shadows had four shapes of field tokens. You had your standard triangular ones with a circular gem slot at each corner, for normal fields. Vision fields had their special circular tokens with only one slot, shaped like flames. Then there were trangular ones with a sort of spiral pattern to the slots, indicating a field with a Tome Chamber that teaches a new skill, and square ones with stripes, for Wizard Towers where you have to unlock certain mechanisms before the last monster wave to win and unlock other benefits. (Usually adding more waves makes a field harder to beat, but in Wizard Tower fields, it buys you more time to destroy the locks.) I don’t think these meanings were ever explained explicitly, but it was an easy pattern to notice.

Frostborn Wrath, now. Frostborn Wrath uses the three token shapes from Chasing Shadows (excluding the one for Vision fields), as well as a couple entirely new ones. But it doesn’t have Tome Chambers or Wizard Towers. Their function as dispensers of unlockables is taken by locked chests, but locked chests aren’t indicated by the shape of the token; there are plenty of locked chests in fields with just the base token. What does the shape indicate, then? I have no idea. Maybe they’re just assigned haphazardly, but I’m not quite willing to believe that. Maybe even without Tome Chambers, there’s a token shape that indicates a field where you can obtain a new skill — but if so, the connection is a lot harder to notice than it was in CS, where skills were always linked to permanent environmental features. There’s probably a lesson in that.

Let’s talk bombs. Gem bombs have been around since the very first Gemcraft game, but I find myself using them a lot more in Frostborn Wrath.

Partly that’s because the slower advancement in power means I more often face the kind of odds where I need them. Gem bombs, as I use them, are mainly an emergency measure: when the monsters are about to close in on your Orb, usually bombs are the fastest and easiest remedy. Unlike towers, which take time to socket the gem and then fire shots that take time to hit their target, bombs are instant. The drawback is, of course, that they’re not reusable. Throwing a lot of bombs uses up your mana quickly.

Although not always! If a bomb kills multiple monsters, it can be a net profit. And this is something that happens more easily in FW than in previous games, due to an optional Battle Trait ¹An extra challenge that improves the XP and loot for the level that causes every single monster to spawn a pair of Spawnlings on death. With that turned on, the later sections of the path frequently become a sea of Spawnlings, easy for bombs to take out en masse. You still wind up with less mana than you’d have if you had killed them without bombs, of course, but not necessarily less than you had when you started bombing them.

On top of that, bombs have simply become more useful over the course of the series. Chasing Shadows introduced the concept of “gem wasps”: little specks or sparks that linger after an explosion, drifting about and darting to hurt any monster that gets close. Suddenly bombs were not just instant effects, but a somewhat lasting defense! Gem wasps are not powerful, but they can be a practical last line of defense, finishing off the almost-dead. And in FW, they’re even better. Gem wasps are now weakly attracted to the mouse pointer. So if one Swarmling wanders off course in an open area, and you bomb it, you can lead the wasps to somewhere more useful. It just takes a little patience.

There are Achievements in both FW and CS for beating a level entirely with bombs and wasps rather than towers. This feels a bit like an Achievement for using only melee weapons in a FPS. It’s not the most straightforward approach, and certainly not the way that the game encourages normally, but it is demonstrably doable. I’d like to think that there are some Gemcraft fans somewhere who really like bombs and never do things any other way.

I’m basically finding Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath to be an improvement over its predecessor in every way, but one of the improvements that I find particularly pleasing is in “Trial Mode”. This is the equivalent of the “Vision” fields in Chasing Shadows, in that it makes you pass a level without your XP or skills, instead giving you a pre-set selection of abilities. The chief difference is that Vision fields were special ones, set apart and not playable the normal way, whereas Trial Mode can be applied to every single battlefield. But on top of that, I’m finding that FW is more willing to use Trial Mode to create bespoke puzzles with specific solutions.

I just hit a particularly good example of this: field T4. In Trial Mode, your starting condition is: You have a single grade 6 red-yellow gem. This is an unusually good thing to start with, capable of holding off an army all by itself if placed well. However, you have only 30 mana. This is not enough to create a tower to put the gem in. You gradually gain mana over time even if you don’t kill anything, so if you could wait long enough, you’d have enough to build a tower. You cannot wait that long. The monsters will destroy your base first.

At this point you might think “I’ll just cash in the gem!” — you can destroy gems to recover 70% of their value, and a grade 6 gem has a base value of over 9000 mana — easily enough to buy a tower and a slightly less overpowering gem to put in it. Except you can’t do that. Every battlefield has a subset of the gem colors you can create from scratch. In field T4 in Trial Mode, that subset is: none of them. The only way to make a new gem would be to spend 9000 mana to duplicate the one you have.

So at this point, I was wondering if it was a bug. It seemed absolutely impossible. But it wasn’t! I won’t give the solution here, but there was a clever application of the rules that let me win rather easily. This is a much better experience than the Visions, where, as I noted before, the winning approach was usually brute force, just sinking as much mana as possible into making a single hero gem.

Now, most of the Trial Mode fields are not like this. Most of them are fairly sedate and fall to familiar tactics. But even there, I think the experience is enhanced by knowing that they could turn out to be special.

I said before that Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath seemed shorter than Chasing Shadows, because I had already reached the extents of the world map, but this didn’t really jibe with other observations, like the greater number of Achievements. It turns out I was simply mistaken. I had reached the left, right, and top edges of the map, as indicated by a decorative border, but, unlike CS, the map here is taller than it is wide. It’s like a scroll of unknown length. This makes progress feel more linear: where my explorations in CS spread out in all directions, in FW they mostly just go downward, with minor branching. The original Gemcraft did something similar, but scrolled horizontally.

The map in CS was made of hexagonal tiles that you unlock over the course of play, each tile being a grouping of several levels, which also have to be unlocked individually. FW is similar, but its map tiles are shaped like 60-degree diamonds in a hexagonal tiling pattern, thematically resembling snowflakes when six come together at a point. In both cases, the tiles seem a bit superfluous, giving the player nothing but an extra layer of stuff to unlock on the way to unlocking new fields. Still, completing a level and seeing a new tile appear gives a sense of progress, and dividing the levels into subsections this way gives you permission to feel a small sense of accomplishment whenever an entire tile is completed.

Still, I have to say that my favorite world map in the whole series is that of Gemcraft: Labyrinth, which didn’t use tiles at all. Instead, it put all the battlefields on a 13×13 grid, and identified each field with grid coordinates. The key thing here is that the fields were connected. Every monster path coming in from the edge of a field matched up with a similar path on the neighboring field on that side. Hence “labyrinth”: the whole game was a single connected maze. (Well, apart from four secret levels in the corners, inaccessible by normal means.) It was a compelling conceit, and made the whole game feel more like a real space, rather than just a collection of isolated levels selectable from a map-shaped menu. And I just love that sort of thing, when disparate pieces gel into something cohesive.