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.