Blue Toad Murder Files
- March 03, 2010 14:42 PM PST
Mixing wry British humor with episodic gaming and puzzles is Relentless Games' goal with their new project, Blue Toad Murder Files. The six-episode murder mystery marks the developer's first non-Buzz! project and first foray into PlayStation Network exclusive games.
I'm conflicted when it comes to episodic games. On the one hand, I like having a consistent (and usually cheap) game to come back to every month or so; but on the other, I see the strain it puts on developers and I often wonder if some of my favorite episodic games wouldn't be better off with a full game release.
Blue Toad Murder Files illustrates the conflict perfectly. It's murder-mystery storyline and puzzle-based gameplay make it perfect for an episodic game I can enjoy in little fits and bursts of an hour at a time. However, the game suffers in a few places for not having had a longer development cycle or a bigger budget. For example, to save money, developer Relentless didn't give any of the colorful cast of characters hands - they focused all their animation efforts on facial expressions (which are pretty important for characters reacting to questioning or a gunshot). It by no means looks "bad," exactly, but it is obvious that Blue Toad is a lower-budget game than the studio's previous game, Buzz! Quiz World.
Despite having their hands cut on the budget, the characters in Blue Toad are pretty entertaining. Most of the game is driven by a narration from voice actor Tom Dussek, who also provides voices for the entire cast of characters. Player-controlled characters are conspicuously mute (because Relentless wants you to think of that character as yourself), but each of the four Blue Toad detectives you can choose to play has their own unique facial expressions that put you in mind of detective-types.
Take Maple, for example. The crotchety-looking old lady was my first pick of character because she immediate reminded me of mystery writer Agatha Christie's Miss Marple character. The other three characters (who could have joined Maple for some four player local co-op, if we'd had enough controllers) resembled Nancy Drew, Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue, and what I take to be a Hardy Boy - if one of those kids wore glasses.
The point of Blue Toad is to navigate your chosen detective through a tiny town filled with thickly-accented British types, plus one "American" who sounds like she fell out of the bad accent tree and hit every branch on the way down. Gameplay consists of interacting with characters to obtain clues and trigger puzzles. Each puzzle is timed and completing the puzzle within a certain time frame nets the player a gold, silver, or bronze medal. The puzzles range in flavor from word scrambles, to math problems, to logic puzzles. Part of me is tempted to compare it to the Professor Layton series on Nintendo DS - but the Blue Toad puzzles are more specific.
Moreover, where Professor Layton is a one-player experience, Blue Toad is meant to be played with people - the more the merrier. At first, I was a little shy about jumping in with Reverb Communications publicist Danitra Alomia and Relentless Producer Jade Tidy; but when I got stuck on a word scramble at the pharmacist's, the group puzzle-solving just sort of clicked. Four puzzles worth of group-solving later, I even forgot to notice the lack of hands on my character model.
Tidy says that this is what delights her most about her game: seeing the way different groups approach the puzzles. She says that men and women handle certain puzzles completely differently and that families get very caught-up in arguing some of the logic puzzles. It's a shame I had to miss out on this game dynamic by virtue of not having enough controllers because for me, it was the best part of Blue Toad Murder Files.
With this project mostly behind them (all six episodes will be on PSN by the end of April), I asked Tidy what Relentless had learned from Blue Toad Murder Files that they could use in the future - either on other episodic games or "Season Two" of Blue Toad Murder Files. She told me that now that they've mastered the money-saving tricks of episodic game production, they'd work on fine-tuning the audio/visual cues in the cut scenes to really cash in the player's powers of perception - and they'd love to come up with enough puzzles so that they'd change with each playthrough.
The first three episodes of Blue Toad Murder Files hit PSN March 25. Each episode costs $7.49, or you can pick up a three-pack for $14.99. The second trio of episodes will be out in the last week of April.
