For this week’s critical play I wrote about Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, a mystery find-the-killer analogue game designed by Raymond Edwards, Suzanne Goldberg, and Gary Grady, published by Sleuth Publications. It’s recommended for ages 13+, but I got the impression that the game was meant for older individuals who were more serious about solving mysteries. The game can be played alone or with 8 people. I played it with 3 players total, with the primary types of fun being dynamics, challenge, and fantasy.
In Consulting Detective, you and your fellow detectives solve murder cases, with each case being a modular puzzle where you go through the different components of the game to cross-check who the killer is. The different components include a set of faux newspaper articles, a rulebook, 10 case books, a map, and a directory. While my group only completed one puzzle (out of 10!), our understanding of the game loop was the following: you would read the intro to the case, you would pick a name you see in the intro and look it up in the directory, and then you would read the corresponding “lead” or description of what happened when you went to their address. Repeat until you figure out the case. You can also either compete against your teammates through a point system, or work together to beat Sherlock himself by using less leads than he did.
There are two channels of narrative that interweave into this game. Firstly and most obviously is the evocative nature of the game. Consulting Detective is literally based on a previous famous IP, Sherlock Holmes, and relies wholly on it. It’s pretty similar to a Star Wars video game in the way where you’re pulling on preexisting player knowledge in order to get the player to be interested in this new content. This is further reinforced by the fact that much of the text in the case books and rule book is literally prose, like you’re reading a book. This game gives you a sense of familiarity with the Sherlock Holmes series by writing descriptive segments that could’ve been in the books themselves, which is a design choice that prioritizes narrative/atmosphere over clarity and lower word count. While the game is evocative of the Holmes series, it’s also evocative of the larger genre of old-timey cool englandish guy solving crime like a great straight cis white man, which can be appealing on its own.
The second channel of narrative has much more to do with the gameplay, an embedded space if you will. As “detectives” in this world, you’re creating a narrative of what you think happened to the victim by putting together various scraps of information (see fig. 1). Is there an article in the newspaper that could confirm someone’s alibi, or was it possible for this person to get from point A to point B according to the map? All of these factors combine to make the imagined narrative, which is the storyline you’re building in your heads (before the final truth is revealed and you discover whether you were right or not.)
This is also where the physical “architecture” of the game comes in. While there’s not actually any real buildings portrayed in this game, I believe the rhetorical “architecture” in this case would be the simplified map of London. In this case, its primary functions would be “exploration” and “constraint” (you’re digging through the city to find leads, but you can only explore the numbered/defined areas to simplify the game), with the secondary functions being “familiarity” and “allusion” (it’s London.) These mechanics and components all combine to create a pretty cohesive experience for the player atmosphere and gameplay wise, as well as defining possibilities for a variety of narratives to play out on the limited-but-still-vast London landscape (see fig. 2).
To be completely honest, I did not enjoy this game. Maybe it’s because I’m not familiar with the mystery genre, or our group wasn’t playing it in a period that was solely and completely dedicated to Sherlock Holmes Time, but there was a lot of confusion surrounding the rules/components which was amplified by the agonizing amount of reading that the prose-like style generated. Any multi-player game with a lot of text is always kind of awkward because either someone has to read it to everybody else which is super slow, OR everyone has to awkwardly sit around the thing and silent read to themselves with varying degrees of silent reading speed. If I were to redesign this game, I would keep some of that prose style but just cut down everything to its bare bones, especially in the rule book.
This also ties into the accessibility barriers that exist in Consulting Detective. Although I’m not someone with low vision, the small size, large amount, and the chosen fonts of the text were difficult to read for me and my teammates, which would make it even harder for someone with low vision to read the text. Some standouts for illegibility were this italic font, which looks fairly light against the brown-ish paper background, as well as this genuinely ILLEGIBLE cursive handwriting (see fig. 3), which I think was actually pretty important for this case but we just could not figure out what it said. While there were no accessibility features for those problems in Consulting Detective, if the game were released as a video game with voice acting (like a similar case-solving mystery game Danganronpa), then it may be more accessible due to how purely text-based the game is.
