Critical Play
Background
I decided to play Tiny Rooms Story Mystery, a mystery game by Kiary Games in which a private detective investigates what happened to the residents of the now empty city of Redcliff. This immersive iOS game challenges the player to solve a series of escape rooms, each of which end with the detective discovering a clue to the next location to examine. Its minimalist style and fun challenges make the game playable for all ages, but its difficulty might cause younger audiences to struggle.
Thesis
In this post, I will explain how the game’s mechanic of discovering and using items enables the player to live out the detective fantasy through an enacting story narrative. Additionally, I will explain how concealment within the game’s architecture controls the flow of the story.
Analysis
In Chapter 1 of the game, the player looks for clues in the home of an important resident and eventually discovers a safe. To unlock it, the player must discover a ladder to reach the attic, discover a crowbar to enter the attic, discover a key from the attic, use it to access a corridor, solve a puzzle in the corridor to access the basement, and finally discover the safe code on the back of a picture. The discover-use-solve game cycle exemplifies what Henry Jenkins describes as an “enacting story.” In his paper, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Jenkins describes how in the genre of enacting stories, players often feel “pleasure in process–in the experiences along the road–that can overwhelm any sense of goal or resolution.” Even though Tiny Rooms Story Mystery has a clear goal, the act of experiencing the life of a detective was more fun for me than trying to solve the mystery of Redcliff. For example, when I discovered the safe code, I was more satisfied by how I found the clue like a detective, rather than how the clue fit into the context of the overall story. The story also embodies Jenkins’s “embedded narrative,” since it requires the player to find clues embedded in the environment and architecture of Redcliff itself.
The architecture of Tiny Rooms Story Mystery also plays a crucial narrative role through concealment, especially through locks and inaccessible areas, to control the pace of the story. For example, in Chapter 2, the detective is trying to access a bank vault to understand why a resident withdrew a large sum of money but is barred from entering until he is able to complete a few discover-use-solve cycles.
These gameplay obstacles are used not only to challenge the player, but to also create narrative suspense by guiding players through a sequence of discoveries. Ernest Adams, in his article, “The Role of Architecture in Video Games,” identifies concealment as a primary function of game architecture, as it supports the flow of gameplay. Key to Adams’s argument was the distinction between architecture in real life and architecture in video games. The architecture of Redcliff’s bank is meant not to be lifelike, but to be like a “false front whose purpose is to support the narrative.” In reality, entering this vault room would require bypassing many more layers of security. However, to evoke the exciting fantasy of detective work and to create reasonably paced gameplay, the game had to take liberties to make it easier for the player to solve puzzles and unveil the concealed.
Conclusion
Overall, Tiny Rooms Story Mystery effectively uses narrative techniques and architecture to tell the story of Redcliff. Through its enacting story, embedded elements, and concealment within the architecture, the player is able to live out the fantasy of a detective through a well-paced narrative.
Ethics
A significant accessibility barrier in Tiny Rooms Story Mystery is its reliance on visual detail. Additionally, the touch-based gameplay requires tapping small objects accurately to interact with them. Ultimately, players with visual impairments or fine motor difficulties may struggle to understand or interact with the story and may be unable to progress entirely. To address visually impaired players, it would have been useful to include a narration setting that reads all text aloud. Other mystery/escape games, like A Way Out and Life is Strange, narrate all dialogue by default, making them accessible to these players. To address players with fine motor difficulties, the rooms and objects could be made larger. At least on iPhone, the rooms currently do not fill the width of the screen, so scaling up the sizes of the rooms and objects can allow more leeway for inaccurate clicks.
