The Deed feels more like a proof of concept than a game unto itself.
You take on the role of Arran Bruce, a bitter, cruel, mean-spirited young man who is angry that his father has passed him over in favor of his sister getting the inheritance.
The solution is clear – murder your sister, and pin the blame on someone else for it.
The gameplay of the game is very simple: afterThe Deed feels more like a proof of concept than a game unto itself.
You take on the role of Arran Bruce, a bitter, cruel, mean-spirited young man who is angry that his father has passed him over in favor of his sister getting the inheritance.
The solution is clear – murder your sister, and pin the blame on someone else for it.
The gameplay of the game is very simple: after arriving at your house and having a brief conversation with the maid, you can walk around the house and talk to the various other persons around the house, as well as witness a few flashbacks of the past. You can also pick up two items in the house – generally speaking, a piece of evidence, and a weapon with which to do The Deed.
For that is indeed your motive here. While you go around the house, you want to talk to the various people in the house and ask them questions which might incriminate them or others later, or plant the idea in their mind that someone else might be capable of murder, or have a motive for murdering your sister. Every conversation has 2 sets of 3-4 choices.
You quickly discover that there are various tensions between members of the household, and numerous bits of incriminating evidence which you can potentially plant later on to frame someone else, or at least cast the blame away from yourself.
After you’ve picked up two items, you are seated at dinner, at which point a brief three-piece conversation ensues which allows you to further cast aspersions on other folks.
After dinner, you can go plant your evidence, and then go in and murder your sister with a weapon (or your bare hands, if you’re feeling particularly brutal), and then run away (with an amount of time dependent on how stealthy your murder method was). Depending on which evidence you planted and which weapon was used, blame might be cast in any number of directions, and you can potentially incriminate anyone in the household, make it appear to be a suicide, result in the case being unsolved, or even be arrested yourself and thrown in jail.
The police are then called in, and you have the ability to speak to the detective about the murder. He questions you about your activities, the things you witnessed around the house, and what your motives were in returning home. Eventually, someone is accused of the crime (or the case is deemed inconclusive) and the game plays one of a handful of epilogues (dependent on who ended up being found guilty, and how strong the evidence was against them), and then you’re back on the title screen, ready to play again.
The first time through, you’re likely to examine absolutely everything and spend some time plotting out how to pull off the murder successfully, but after your first playthrough what is and is not significant becomes much more obvious, and getting all the endings (and using all the murder weapons) becomes much easier as you know how to properly manipulate things towards the ending you want.
While all of this seems reasonably clever, the reality is that your first playthrough is likely to be completed in less than half an hour – possibly much less – and subsequent playthroughs are vastly faster as you know exactly what to do, where to go, and the like. The whole game is very small and tight, and frankly is pretty much the minimum size for it.
Unfortunately, while the game is reasonably clever about some of the things, it at times felt a little too straightforward; you can’t really create any sort of convoluted plot where someone is trying to frame someone else to confuse the police, it is all very straightforward. There is a reasonable number of options – and the first time through, there is a real sense of discovery – but you’re looking at 20-30 minutes of that versus an hour and a half of achievement hunting, if you want to see all the text and get all the achievements.
Ultimately, the game was at its most fun on the first playthrough, and while it was neat seeing all the ways you could go about setting things up in your favor, after a while it all becomes fairly rote. The characters are all flat and pretty two-dimensional, and there just isn’t enough space in the game for them to really breathe as people. The overall idea of playing reverse detective to mess with the police and get the desired outcome is a very clever one, but the game basically has that idea and nothing else.
Is it worth getting? The game costs basically nothing, so it is hard to knock it on price, and it is an interesting concept. That said, there isn’t really much meat here, and I’m not sure how interested most people would be in how all the pieces fit together. As such, while the idea is neat enough, the game itself just doesn’t carry much weight; it is just “this is a cool idea, isn’t it?” and… that’s it. If that's enough for you, there are worse ways to spend a couple quarters. If not, you're not missing something important… Expand
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