Blueprint for Murder

Like many of us now, I'm having a blast with the new Animal Crossing. While the game has always been about simulating life in a way, and given you a lot of furniture, clothes and other customization options to build whatever you want, it wasn't until Happy Home Designer (3DS), with its more robust interior options and the fact you could use whatever furniture you want, that I really got into recreating scenes in the game. With the new options to terraform in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I've got loads of plans to turn my island into a wonderful place, but I also still like to recreate well-known small locations or scenes within the game, like from the original film adaptation of Yokomizo Seishi's Inugamike no Ichizoku (The Inugami Clan).

Recreating these settings from well-known mystery stories do force you to really think about the layout of a certain location. With mystery stories in visual media, like films or comics, this is of course not really a problem, but unless your novel has some nifty diagrams or floorplans, you probably will have to read the descriptions in the text very carefully to get a good idea of the place, and even then you have to hope that the descriptions are detailed enough. Two years ago, I wrote a short article on some of the diagrams/floorplans in mystery novels I like, but stories featuring such diagrams are definitely the exception. There's a limit to how much a text can really convey the vision an author has of the setting, and sometimes the description only touches upon the minimum needed for the story. And sometimes, it can simply by a bit confusing. To stick with Yokomizo: Honjin Satsujin Jiken was recently released in English as The Honjin Murders. The story goes that  it was only when the first visual adaptations appeared, like the 1975 film adaption, that people truly understood how the locked room murder there had been done, because it's pretty complex, and it was only in the film people got a real sense of space, and where everything and everyone was located. It's a reason why Arisugawa Alice's An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998 was so cool: it featured beautifully drawn diagrams for all the locked room mysteries discussed in this guide, even those originally don't have any floorplans/diagrams. It really helped convey how these rooms and other locations must look like, showing the relative locations of every significant object/person.

But going back to videogames, recreating that scene from Inugamike no Ichizoku made me think of two things. One: wouldn't it be great to have some sort of videogame where you could walk around yourself in recreations of locked room murder crime scenes and other iconic locations from famous mystery stories in a videogame? Like being to roam around on the island of the Decagon House? Or get lost in the corridors of the Labyrinth House? Witness the awe-inspiring Werewolf Castle yourself? See how the hotel in Shijinsou no Satsujin changes by the hour as they come closer and closer? Or just imagine being able to move the camera into that object in the Crooked Mansion and see the house from a completely different point of view! I had actually expected more reaction to my review of Yuureitachi no Fuzai Shoumei ("The Alibis of the Ghosts") earlier this week, but wouldn't it be fun to go through that haunted classroom yourself? Of course, there are games like Minecraft where you can could do that yourself, and even in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I think something like The Honjin Murders should be doable, but it would be great to have an official game built around this, for example with an overarching plot of new murders being committed there or something like that. By the way, yes, I know there's a RPG based on Ayatsuji's House series. Has some fancy music too.

The other realization was that I had never really considered how mystery videogames have been so great at presenting floorplans and diagrams, and convey a sense of how every location relates to each other. Of course, this isn't some universal truth for all mystery videogames out there, but when it's utilized well, videogames can definitely go a bit further than novels in terms of making use of space in their mystery plots. In many games, you control the character directly yourself, or you at least choose the locations to go to via a map, which automatically means the developers have to think of how each room, or each location is connected to each other and this really gives the player a great awareness of space. A map is often used to navigate between the locations, so a player usually remembers the exact floorplan of a location much better than in a novel, which can just jump between scenes instantly, whereas in the game, you are usually doing some specific action to move between locations. And with that, you often get a better understanding of how each room in a mansion is connected for example, or how it lies in relation to another room on another floor. Or for example height differences! One of the fan-favorite cutscenes in Gyakuten Saiban 5 (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies) is sometimes discussed because of its comedic value, but what it really did was convey exactly where one location was relative to another location, including angle and height.

Of course, novels can also utilize ingenious murder tricks that use a three-dimensional space, but they are seldom as clear as in videogames. Mystery videogames can convey such spaces much more directly, and clearer to the player and by extension, also present more complex variants that make use of a three-dimensional space in a more natural manner. The Danganronpa videogames for example have several episodes that feature interesting murders that utilize space and location three-dimensionally, and these concepts work better because the player has been controlling the protagonist character themselves, walking between the various locations and learning how everything is connected. I won't spoil the exact episodes, but one episode in Super Danganronpa 2 for example does something fantastic with the player's sense of three-dimensional space, while New Danganronpa V3 has several episodes with murder plots that are good at showing how various locations are interlinked, and another episode that makes use of two-dimensional space in a way no novel can do. The recently reviewed PlayStation 2 game of Tantei Gakuen Q ("Detective Academy Q") too features one chapter that makes more sense if you can visualize everything three-dimensionally. Videogames can convey space in a perfectly natural manner to a player, so it's really satisfying when a plot makes use of that.

Anyway, that was enough rambling from me for today. Any mystery novels you know where you think a three-dimensional presentation of the crime scene/location would've done wonders? Stories that made an impresssion because of they utilized space? Or is there one particular location you'd love to explore yourself in a videogame?