Radio Suspect

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon 

Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned? 

Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?

"Colors of the Wind" (Judy Kuhn)

One of the traditions of the Kyoto University Mystery Club is the whodunnit story, where a member will write a two-part mystery story (the problem and the solution) and challenge the other members to solve the problem part based on the clues in the story. This game is usually done in a physical format, i.e. the session leader hands out a printed copy to every person participating. With everyone having access to a computer, printer and photocopier (either at home or campus) nowadays, this is of course very easily done, but this wasn't the case when the Mystery Club first started. The earliest Mystery Club whodunnit stories were done, well, basically manually: members wrote their stories by hand (because even word processors weren't available then) and usually, the leader had to read the story out loud themselves, with everyone in the room just listening carefully to the story. It's a thing that's always interested me, because I like mystery fiction in all kinds of media, yet I haven't experienced much mystery media that was specifically created for as an experience to listen to. Sure, I have listened to audio dramas etc., but few of them were original audio dramas, and even fewer actually feature a mystery plot that makes use of the audio format.

So I had been curious to the game Unheard - Voices of Crime (Steam/Switch) for some time now, as it was a mystery game that focuses a lot on audio. In Unheard, you play an "Acoustic Detective" who is tasked to look into a few past cases, but from a sound-based angle. As the Acoustic Detective, you can review a case by listening in on conversations of all the related parties of a case, taking place during a period of  of 5 ~ 15 minutes long. You are also provided with a tablet with a floorplan, where you can see where everybody was at a certain point of time. As the detective, you need to solve the mystery of each case, ranging from theft, bombings and murder, by eavesdropping on everyone, figuring what everyone's doing and thinking at what time, and finally figure out, whodunnit, all based on audio clues only.

Well, that's not entirely true, as the floorplan (a visual clue) for each case is also very important.

 

Anyway, Unheard - Voices of Crime is a very short game, but it's pretty interesting, and certainly has an original angle. In essence, Unheard - Voices of Crime is quite close to other deduction-focused mystery games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol: you are shown a certain scene playing out (in the case of Unheard, you mostly listen to a scene), and from the clues picked up in that scene, you are asked to deduce certain facts, like who is who. In the case of Unheard, you'll be handling a few cases which are all about something quite different, from a theft to a bombing, but you are usually given two major tasks: one is to identify every person you hear in the case, and secondly, figure out who did it (and usually a few sub-questions). Each new case you'll be given a list of names, but you don't know which names belong to what voice. On the floorplan you'll see indications where a certain speaking voice is coming from (the sound source), but you don't know who this person is initially. So it's up to you to deduce the identities of everyone who plays a (speaking) role in the game. Sometimes, it's as easy as simply overhearing a conversation where the two persons address each other by names, but in other instances you'll have to do a bit more thinking yourself, like deducing a name by eliminating the other possibilities (by assigning the names to others). As the Acoustic Detective, you can only overhear conversations (or people talking to themselves) if you move your icon to the same room, near the person(s) speaking at the right time, meaning that if you are listening to character A talking in one room, you might be missing out on an important conversation going on in a different room. Fortunately, you can always rewind (or fast-forward) in time, and by eventually listening to everyone speaking, you can connect all the dots and figure out who is who through all the clues dropped in those conversations. The audio makes some use of binaural audio by the way, so it's recommended listening to the game with headphones. The game was originally Chinese, but has full English and Japanese localizations, so the audio is also in those respective languages, which must have been a rather big task for a relatively small scale game.

Identifiying each character however isn't enough, as each case is... about a case. A case that needs solving. This second part of each case is the trickier part of the game, because you are tasked to solve for example a bombing just by listening to everyone, but it's not like there's a character who says out loud "I am the bomber, I am now pushing the button to set the bomb off!" You thus have to listen to all the conversations going on, and try to pick up clues to indicate what exactly happened. I described this as tricky, because all you have are sounds, which leads to some interesting mystery solving segments. For example, you can't see two persons passing objects to another, you can only see sound sources on the floorplan approaching each other and them greeting each other. So the game does require you to think a bit differently than you're likely used to in most mystery games. It's definitely what makes Unheard a unique experience, because this kind of focus on audio is basically never seen in mystery fiction, even though it has so much potential.

I do have to say though, that the potential is also not really fully explored in this particular game. It's really short with just a handful of cases (of which two are basically tutorials), and most of the mystery of each case can really be solved by just... listening at least once to every conversation made. A lot of the initial mystery of each case just comes from the fact you haven't listened to anything yet, but once you have heard all the conversations playing out across the floorplan, you'll already have figured out 75% of all the problems you need to solve each case. There's not really a change in gameplay or clever ways to make the puzzle-solving more challenging: it's basically just each case becoming more difficult because there are more characters who talk more across a longer period of time, meaning there's just more to do each time. The 'explanations' of each case once you've solved it are also very meagre, basically only repeating a few key lines, and fleshing out the explanations/the proof might have given each case just a little bit more impact.

But on the whole, Unheard - Voices of Crime was a pretty fun game, and because I picked up during a sale, I definitely think it was worth the price of admission, if not only for the very unique experience for a detective game. I hope we see more of these kinds of games, because there's so much potential for audio-based mystery fiction (with plots that actually make use of audio as clues/tricks etc.) and while I always thought the audio drama would make the most sense for that, Unheard shows that a game format is also very capable of using audio to present a fun, puzzle-focused mystery.