Category: Reviews (Page 4 of 13)

Unlocking the Secrets of Detective Mimo

July 5, 2021 / Michael Andersen

Hopefully if you’re reading this, you’ve already played through Detective Mimo. While this article will not provide a comprehensive walkthrough of the game, it does break down the game’s two endings, as well as walking through the secrets contained inside the developers’ secret room, pictured above.

If you’d prefer to experience the game yourself, skip this article and play the game, or read the spoiler-free review, instead. This article will assume you’ve finished the game, and spoil some key moments along with the final optional puzzle trail.

A Puzzle Game Built with Smartphones in Mind
As established in the previous article, while Detective Mimo initially positions itself as a puzzle game centered around stopping a bank heist, players learn there’s another layer to the game shortly after Mimo “solves the case”. After completing the game’s first cycle, Cat Rogue reveals his true intentions: hacking Detective Mimo‘s code, and rewriting the game in his own image. And that process starts as soon as the player resets the game, at Mimo’s urging: players are returned to a glitched out version of the Police Station, and the game’s text has been replaced with gibberish.

As before, the Police Station serves as a tutorial for players. But while the first cycle taught players to leverage point and click gameplay mechanics, the second cycle taught them that the game’s mechanics themselves are the puzzling playground. Since this is a tutorial mission, a neatly placed QR code on the desk instructs players to eliminate the gibberish by going to the game’s language settings, while Mimo’s faceless visage is fixed by “stealing” the face off a TV news report running in the background, and superimposing it on Mimo’s icon in the game’s dialogue box.

This style of gameplay continues throughout the second cycle: a desk that previously unlocked by swatting a mouse on a spring with finger swipes now requires players to vigorously shake their phones. Restoring power to an electrical panel that previously relied on a logic puzzle now requires physically plugging your phone into a charger. Bypassing a “quantum decoder” requires placing your phone upside down, waiting for the phone’s light to flash, and then transcribing morse code in order to generate a dynamic three-character passcode. These are all puzzles that could only exist on a smartphone, and each challenge is clued well enough to unambiguously lead to the solution without robbing players of the thrill of realization.

Which brings us to the end. Or rather, the ends.

Sometimes, Choices Are Irreversible: A Tail of Two Conclusions
Once Mimo hacks into the Machine Room’s Command Console, she urges the player to type “END” and put an end to Cat Rogue’s Doomsday Program. Cat Rogue opposes that by throwing some of the game’s hardest puzzles at the player, before deleting the contents of the app. Mimo encourages the player to drop her file in the recycling bin, promising she’ll be restored once the game resets…

Only for players to learn that Mimo was the hacker all along: after becoming aware of her own existence due to a bug, she set up a scenario to escape the hell of repeating the same activities over and over again, surrounded by soulless puppets. By tricking the player into deleting her, she finally frees herself. And in doing so, she bricks the game, leaving only a record of the player’s achievements, the playable mini-game MEOWRIO, and a note from Mimo:

Player,

This is my last farewell. Everyone is trying to escape, though each in his own way. Thanks for your help!

Mimo

Because the game has trained players to listen to Mimo, this is the most likely ending players are going to get on their first playthrough. That also means that most players are forced to clear the game’s cache and start from scratch at this point, if they want to see what more the game has to offer. While this is a tall order, the game does acknowledge players’ effort and sacrifice, by asking all new players what color key they should remember, when starting a new game. Players who went through this ending should remember using a Silver key in the final endgame puzzle, and selecting that in subsequent playthroughs changes the gameplay in subtle ways to recognize that effort.

The game’s alternative conclusion involves using the command console to remove Mimo from the picture, before traveling across the glitched out world of Shrimp City collecting six fragments of the RESTART button. Pursuing this path does preserve the game’s universe (and preserves players’ saved achievements across playthroughs), but it leaves Mimo stuck in her endless loop. It also comes at an emotional cost, as the only way to get the key fragment hiding behind the Branch Manager is to remove him from the scene, effectively killing him.

Detective Mimo‘s dueling conclusions place game and narrative at loggerheads: reassembling the fragments of the Restart button preserves the game’s integrity, but requires players to abandon and destroy every narrative part of the game they came to love. Giving in to Mimo’s wishes provides the narrative resolution she so desperately wanted, at the cost of leaving the game a husk of its former self.

There are puzzles and challenges beyond this, but none that cheapen the game’s ultimate choice.

Road to the Secret Room, and Beyond
At one point in the game, players are forcibly kicked out of the app, and the play button on the start screen’s monitor is replaced with a lock screen: the Cat Rogue is trying to keep the player out of the system. However, a virtual clipboard file has the password conveniently stored. Any players lost in the flow of the game will paste that text in and move along. However, players curious enough to investigate receive the following message:

[Player] would never think I will hide the passcode here and the way to unlock is just to copy-paste these words. After all, I’m the exceptionally intelligent Cat Rogue. It’s a pity that I didn’t open the safe in the vault this time. If only there’s a way to cut out the electricity in the corridor againâ€¦

Throwing a cup of water on the electric panel cuts the power to the vault, allowing players to waltz right into the vault room, and discover a secret passageway under the secret vault. After solving a series of puzzles that use everything from your smartphone’s gyroscope and volume controls to its front facing camera, players find their way to the developers’ secret room, containing one final puzzle.

The developer on the far right of the secret room has an IP address written on her notepad. The password to access that page is hidden within the room. An (S) on a coffee cup. An (E) on a bag of chips. A developer idly tapping out morse code for (C) on a notepad. An (R) on the Achievements trophy, sitting in plain sight all along. (E) on a laptop, and a paper airplane flying towards the letter (T).

Using SECRET as the password, players are taken to the download page for the Secret.zip file, which contains a password-protected PowerPoint file, and an audio file named X-X-X-X.mp3, spelling out the password in reverse: OREZ ENO XIS.

Once unlocked, the PowerPoint reveals high definition versions of the slides featured in the developer’s room: only now, players can manipulate them to rearrange the images to reveal two messages: “FIND THE NUMBER”, and “RENAME X-X-X-X.RAR”. After renaming the audio file as a *.RAR file, a text file hinted at the final steps to unlock Surprise.JPG, the reward for the puzzle trail.

BACK TO PPT , FIND THEM â—†–â–¡–â˜…–â—‡–â˜†
?? ?? ??? ????? ???? ???? ?????
THE LEFT SIDE OF THE DIAMOND

Following this next (and final) round of instructions involved going back to the second PowerPoint slide and finding the bolded words between the symbols: GO TO THE PLACE WITH MOST WORDS. That clue pointed to the game’s Credits page, where a series of numbers were conveniently placed immediately to the left of the diamonds used as section breaks. Reordering those numbers by the grid in the lower right corner of the slide yielded the final password of 6713, and unlocked the following image.

While the difficulty for this puzzle trail ramped up considerably, Detective Mimo built clues into the construction to make sure players never had to go too many steps without receiving guidance on how to tackle the next step.

Iconography on the secret room’s password page provided a clear and unambiguous structure to getting the password to download the ZIP file. Once unzipped, the audio file is the only file solvers can open, hinting that the password for the PowerPoint is contained within. Even the PowerPoint sets a framework for puzzlers to proceed: the first slide provides a relatively simple and straightforward challenge of matching images to spell out a message, so that players can apply similar logic to the second slide. The only step along the way that wasn’t supported by subtle guidance along the way was discovering the optional puzzle path in the first place. Either you read the text copied to your clipboard, or you didn’t.

This puzzle wasn’t essential to the narrative, it was just a fun easter egg plugged into the game by the game’s developers as thanks for players who probed deeper into the game. There’s another similar easter egg in the game featured in one of the screencaps of this article that links to a public talk one of the creators gave in Chinese, which kicks off its own puzzle trail to follow, albeit one that requires a certain degree of Chinese fluency.

But there’s one final twist, to mention.

One Last Message From the Developers: Backstory for the Completionists
Players who reached the game’s final page after completing all the achievements received a note from the creators.

Congratulations on lighting up all the achievements. This is not an easy task. Actually, this game started off as a board game, but after a series of changes, it has evolved into what it is right now. And because of a sudden inspiration, it has changed from a story of catching the villain into a story of a trapped AI breaking the fourth wall and escaping the shackles of the game world.

This is the first time for OMESCAPE to develop a mobile game. Previously, we were trying to transform the real world into a game by designing reality game or interactive books. We really like the feeling of integrating the fantasy world and real world, and unconsciously brought the same philosophy into Mimo.

We sincerely appreciate your time and effort to complete all the tasks. Whether you are here to enjoy the plot or just for the fun of solving puzzles, I hope the time you spent on this can bring you happiness.

Thank you for helping MMO’s escape.

OMESCAPE Xu Aolin

My first exposure to OMESCAPE was playing their Kingdom of Cats escape room in San Jose, which also heavily featured anthropomorphic cats. But the escape room Detective Mimo reminds me the most of is their most recent virtual room, Pursuit of the Assassin Artist. Both escape room and mobile game approached time loops with a lighthearted, comedic spin, and impressed me at the mastery displayed in their chosen mediums: both games could only exist in their respective media, and benefited from that design philosophy greatly.

Special thanks to Michael Feldman, for both recommending Detective Mimo and being an instrumental partner in plumbing the game’s depths

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss It: Lonely Assassins Return in Found-Phone Game

June 27, 2021 / Michael Andersen

“They’re coming. The Angels are coming for you. But listen. Your life could depend on this. Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink, and you’re dead. They are fast. Faster than you could believe. Don’t turn your back, don’t look away, and DON’T BLINK.”

The Weeping Angels are one of the most iconic villains introduced in the BBC’s Doctor Who. As long as someone is observing the quantum-locked creatures known as “Lonely Assassins”, they look like perfectly normal statues. But look away for even a moment, and they’ll come for you. Not to kill…but to send you into the past, stealing away any future you might have had. The Weeping Angels literally feast on your potential, leaving you behind as an inevitability.

It’s telling that the Weeping Angels weren’t introduced in an episode pitting The Doctor and his then-companion Martha Jones against the creatures during their debut episode, Blink. Instead, the plot revolved around two ordinary brits: Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale. The pair do receive a series of cryptic messages spliced into a series of DVDs as easter eggs, but it’s not The Doctor’s adventure viewers are following: it’s theirs. Therefore, it’s fitting that the BBC turned back to Blink as inspiration for its first foray into the “found-phone” genre of games, making Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins act as the official sequel to one of the most beloved fan favorite episodes.

More than a decade has passed since Sally and Larry (now Lawrence) faced off against the Weeping Angels. In the intervening years, Sally moved to the United States, and Larry fell in love and settled down. But something went terribly wrong, and The Lonely Assassins opens with you, the player, finding Larry Nightingale’s missing phone. Can you pore through the evidence contained within and find out what happened to Larry, and stop it from happening to anyone else?

Pictures of Gwen Delivers Aesthetic ARG Dream

May 31, 2021 / Michael Andersen

Gwenhwyfar Thomas is a second-year university student studying Fine Arts, who landed the offer of a lifetime: a chance to work at Asterith International as a Graphic Designer. All she needs to do? Drop out of university, move to the city of Torstoy, and complete a probationary period over the next few months. Gwen created the Instagram account Pictures of Gwen, to document snapshots of her new life through sketches and watercolor art, celebrating highly aesthetic moments such as befriending a local magpie, exploring the local farmer’s market, and wandering through local parks. She even started working on a zine. In short: if Gwen Thomas didn’t move to a city, she’d probably be living the cottagecore dream.

However, dig a little deeper and something seems slightly off about this particular dream. Why would a major marketing firm reach out to an unproven university student, and ask her to join the company before she even applied to work there? Why is the city littered with tarot-themed graffiti, in what one commenter described as a “Torstow version of Banksy”? And why does the city of Torstow’s tourist website have a secret message hidden in the website, telling visitors to “seek her in the room marked with a spade”?

Learning More About Torstow: Zine Subscriptions Optional
Many mysteries remain unanswered, but one thing is clear: Pictures of Gwen is an alternate reality game, created by the team at Rogue Beacon, best known for their work on Boomtown Fair’s alternate reality game, featured on Night Mind’s channel. According to Pictures of Gwen‘s out-of-game website, while the game has started out as a simple story of a naive art student moving to the city to make a name for herself in the wonderful world of marketing, the story will soon take a turn towards magical realism, as Gwen “travels on the ley lines where mythology, art, and modernity meet…in the not-quite-shadow of a cyclopean tower that can only be seen through the corner of the eye.”

Mechanically, Gwen’s Instagram is the central hub for the story. From that central point, the narrative sprawls across a variety of websites, radio broadcasts, and even physical artifacts that breathe life into Gwen’s adventure and the fictional city of Torstow through monthly episodes. And while the game is free to play, invested players can sign up for monthly mailings that add a tactile element to the experience. The first mailing included everything from the first edition of Gwen’s zine and prints of some of her Instagram watercolor paintings to her welcome letter from Asterith International. And since players are meticulously documenting their packages once they’re delivered, the subscription element of the game remains a purely optional choice for prospective players.

PBHere For You: An Animated Escape

February 16, 2021 / Michael Andersen

In October 2020, the TikTok channel PBHere started posting videos from inside a seemingly abandoned facility. Over the next few months, player suggestions helped guide the alternate reality game’s amnesic protagonist to learn more about why they were locked in a room there to begin with, and how to escape. Over the series’ 31-episode run, PBHere told a remarkably succinct standalone narrative driven by audience interactions, that attracted over 1 million subscribers and 60 million views…as expressed through over 16 minutes of 3D animation by series creator yatoimtop.

One of the things that made PBHere so special was its ability to seamlessly create a project that felt highly interactive, while operating within considerable constraints in both time and resources as an animated TikTok adventure. And the game’s opening escape room challenge provides a perfect illustration of that balance.

Escape the Room: Stranded PBHere With No Memories
PBHere begins with video of a person trapped in a room talking to his cellphone with no memory of who he is, why he’s there, or even how long he’s been stuck there. A quick camera pan shows the room is sparsely decorated: there’s nothing in the room other than a bed, a chair, security cameras, and a keypad-locked door with a meal slot.

Since the letters “PB” were embroidered on the jacket, players quickly took to referring to their reluctant protagonist as PB. Over the next few videos, PBHere lays out the rules for interaction through PB’s video responses: first, by snarkily responding to a video comment of “hello”, before responding to a question asking if he remembered anything at all. In the next installment, PB explored the room in response to player feedback, confirming that the suggestions were good, but ultimately resulted in dead ends.

PB even followed up on the significantly more violent recommendation of throwing a chair against the window. After the chair breaks in pieces on impact PB quips, “well it was a good idea, it was just a flimsy chair. And also my only chair.” Within the sparse environment, PBHere established the rules for the game. The game responds directly to player input, that player input could range from open questions to recommended actions, and that those actions can have negative consequences.

Having set those ground rules, players proceeded to tackle the puzzle at hand: after more closely inspecting the keypad itself, players noticed that four digits were more worn out than the rest: 0, 2, 4, and 8. And when PB passed his cellphone through the door’s slot to get a better look at the hallway, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that a series of musical notes were etched into the ledge under the door’s windowpane. The notes spelled out ‘CECFD’ – in order to play those notes on the keypad PB had to type 80824, unlocking the door…before stumbling across a slumped body in a hazmat suit just around the corner from PB’s holding cell.

PBHere‘s initial locked room served as both tutorial mission for players, as well as an illustration of the types of gameplay to expect out of the experience. But as the door unlocked, both scope of experience and scope of gameplay expanded.

Diving Into Thickett to Re-Right Grimm Tales

November 23, 2020 / Michael Andersen

Long ago, in a world very different than ours, a princess convinced God and Death to write a book with the answers of how to live a perfect life. In response, the pair gave her The Book of Turns, a collection of stories providing guidance on how to live well. But after the princess spread pages of the story through the land, the stories changed, stripping away the moral lessons that gave them their power. To fix matters, the princess founded THICKETT: an organization dedicated to dive into the tales, and rewrite the wrongs.

In Cirque du Nuit‘s serial immersive production Thickett, players join one of three departments tasked with re-assembling The Book of Turns through a combination of immersive theater, puzzle-solving, and exploration. Each installment of the game’s six chapter run is intended to function as a stand-alone “Quest” exploring a different theme, with a new 90-minute episode coming out on Fridays and Saturdays every two weeks. The second installment goes live later this week, on November 27th and 28th.

A Glance Beyond the Thickett Fence: Anatomy of a Quest
When prospective players sign up to participate in a Thickett Quest, they are asked to fill out an intake form to get sorted into the appropriate department as a “Seeker”. Once accepted, they are provided with their department, an employee identification number, and login credentials to a departmental-specific resource page with an “Employee Handbook”, providing the in-game and out-of-game rules for the experience, as well as a link to the game’s optional Discord server.

Players started out on a Zoom call with Thickett corporate, before splitting out into departmental breakout rooms to be briefed on the department’s objectives for the mission. The Department of Foxes encourages the use of cunning to advance their personal agendas, the Department of Rabbits are focused on helping others and cultivating friendships, and the Department of Ravens is dedicated to the dogged pursuit of truth. After undergoing a brief onboarding and initiation process, players are thrust into the game world to immerse themselves in the Quest’s theme, before returning to Departmental breakout rooms to compete for the best re-write of the underlying folktale.

Episode 1 thrust players into the story of Godfather Death, although the corrupted tale players were presented with omitted a key element of the tale that stripped it of its morality. However, scattered throughout the world were hints of other Grimm tales, ranging from modern classics like Cinderella to lesser-known tales like The Brave Little Tailor. Each faction had separate objectives to achieve in the world, although the mechanisms were the same: find ways to assist the various non-player characters inhabiting the world, and unlock more chances to alter sections of Godfather Death. As THICKETT CEO, the Princess would go on to select one version of the story to re-write (and hopefully, re-right) the narrative.

Topia: The Heart of Thickett’s Multi-Player Point and Click Adventure
The bulk of Thickett takes place on Topia, a video chat platform layered on top of a point-and-click virtual world: audiovisual feeds from other players and NPCs only come into view when your digital avatar is nearby, and gradually fade away as your avatar walks away.

Thickett‘s world is littered with a handful of clickable items: some items expand to display images or videos, while others are portals that transport players to other sections of the realm. In the first episode, there was even a portal with restricted access: directly entering the location could only be accomplished by talking to the right NPC and getting express permission to enter.

And while players didn’t assume the roles of characters when entering Thickett for the most part: functionally, gameplay resembled other NPC-forward Larp-adjacent experiences like Evermore Park and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. While characters were happy to respond to more active roleplaying when players sought it out, their primary role was sending players out on quests, challenging them to games and diversions, and providing helpful information to arm players for their upcoming revisions.

This spatially-aware system for interacting with the world was incredibly effective at creating a sense of presence in the world, in part due to the resonance of the visuals. Topia’s minimalistic art style plays particularly well with Thickett‘s fairy tale theming, evoking nostalgic memories of EH Shepard’s illustrations of Winnie the Pooh‘s Hundred Acre Wood.

Topia (and Gather, its 16-bit competitor in the spatially aware video chat space) are a powerful tool for creators looking to simulate the joy of exploration and serendipity that lies at the heart of many location-specific immersive theater and Larp productions. While platforms like VRChat, Minecraft, and even Second Life have delivered more sophisticated avatar-mediated virtual spaces, there’s something viscerally satisfying about turning a corner and gradually seeing a human face coming into view.

A Spoiler-Free Unpacking of Neil Patrick Harris’ BoxONE

November 16, 2020 / Michael Andersen

There’s an often-repeated contemporary folktale: if you try and place a frog in a boiling pot of water, it will immediately jump out. But if you place the frog into cool water and slowly turn up the temperature, it won’t notice the gradual change until the water is boiling hot. This apocryphal tale may not apply to actual frogs, but it makes for one heck of a compelling metaphor. With Neil Patrick Harris’ single-player puzzling experience BoxONE, the heat is turned up so deftly, you’ll barely notice the game’s evolution from trivia game into…well, that would be telling.

ARGs and the Slow Burn Narrative
Since alternate reality games play out in real time across platforms, ARGs will frequently throw their players into a ludo-narrative pot: start by introducing players to something that’s relatively normal and familiar, and then gradually introduce fantastic elements as the story progresses. This has the side effect of making players sound mildly unhinged when describing their experiences, since what they experienced as a slowly unfolding narrative is an abrupt shock to the system for the listener.

Lonelygirl15 started out as a teenage girl’s vlog, before evolving into a story about a death cult harvesting human blood in the quest for immortality. I Love Bees started with a beleaguered beekeeper struggling with a glitching website before turning into a story about a time-travelling artificial intelligence struggling to piece itself back together. I Am Sophie started with an out-of-touch influencer’s YouTube debut before teasing players with potentially fatal plane crashes, brainwashing video games, and murderous entities.

The indie game scene has produced projects with similar trajectories, albeit at a quicker pace: James Lantz’ Discord-powered game SmileBot may start out as a simple chatbot that measures a server’s emoji usage, into a multi-phased text adventure that’s a single player game, except for when it isn’t. Frog Fractions may start out as a childish edutainment game of arithmetic, but it hops rapidly through increasingly ridiculous genres and scenarios until the game’s sequel is launched as a secret easter egg in the game Glittermitten Grove.

Which brings us back to BoxONE: a game coyly described on its website as “an ever-evolving game of trivia, codes, puzzles, and discovery only from the mind of Neil Patrick Harris.”