Murderous Muses mixes the deduction principle of Cluedo with FMV clips in the style of The 7th Guest. However, the humorous detective story only becomes brilliant when it assigns the roles of the murder witnesses to "living" oil paintings.
Murderous Muses review: In a chaotic world like ours, I praise D'Avekki Studios, because there is a certain consistency in their games. You don't know what I'm talking about? Well, a D'Avekki game always consists of an ice-cold corpse, great quality FMV scenes and actress Aislinn De'Ath. Yes, always! The new game from the Brits, Murderous Muses, also maintains this tradition, but still does something decisively different from its predecessors.
In fact, the sometimes funny whodunit-style crime game does not consist solely of interactive film scenes, but embeds them in the nightly silence of a somewhat haunted art gallery. You can freely walk through it in the role of the night watchman in order to (attention!) solve a murder case with the help of living portrait paintings. Our review will reveal what's behind it, and whether the procedural game design really allows for an "infinite" number of playthroughs.
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Murderous Muses opens with an edition of the fictional TV show "Mirlhaven's Unsolved Mysteries", a satirical rehash of the '90s mystery series "X-Factor". Here, the host Count von Count... sorry, I mean Crispin Howe (Klemens Koehring) lets you in on the "juicy details" of the Mordechai Grey murder case. The appropriate background atmosphere is being provided by a hunchbacked tree and a resident crow.
According to the story, Grey was a shady painter who had the misfortune of being sent over the edge by one of his portrait models. A total of six of his "muses" are suspects in the crime, but so far the case has not been solved. You follow all this via the surveillance monitor of an art gallery where you are employed as a night watchman. Which brings up the question of how the murder of Mordechai Grey is your concern?
It's simple: Your sentry object "coincidentally" contains portraits of the suspected murderers that will come to life as soon as you press an info button. The pictures then will show past conversations between the artist and his muses (through Mordechai's eyes). Why this is so can only be speculated. However, it does quite appear that the ghost of Mordechai Grey is haunting the exhibits so that his murder can finally be solved. You can learn about the suspects in detail in the spoiler box below.
Your job is to gather clues from the living portraits (a.k.a. movie scenes) and use them to determine who killed Grey. Which of the six muses is the culprit is determined at random at the beginning of the game. However, you don't walk aimlessly through the gallery and randomly watch the high-quality film snippets from the first-person perspective. Rather, Murderous Muses guides you through the game via tasks and clues scattered throughout the gallery.
In plain language, your private investigation is divided into three nights that end when you want them to end. At the beginning of each night, you'll be given a simple task by your rude superior Sasha, such as hanging up freshly delivered paintings. These tasks are exactly the same every time you play and serve the purpose of leading you around the gallery.
This way, you'll inevitably stumble across information boards that tell you in which order you should "interrogate" which muse on which subject. This way you'll also unlock the police interrogations of the suspected killers, which you can use to gain information about the course of events.
Here's a practical example: If an information board on Dominique Serrant lists the topics Job (1) and Ambition (2), the first thing you do with Dominique's portrait is hang it above a sign that says "Job". By pressing the sign, which also functions as an info button, a movie on the respective topic is then played in the picture frame. Movies can also be displayed in full screen via menu settings. After that, you take the painting to a sign that says "Ambition" and so on.
In total, there are more than 700 movie clues in the game, which are impossible to watch within one or even two playthroughs. This is because the content of the clue boards varies with each run, and in addition, the number of possible "interrogations" per night is limited. This is due to the fact that each portrait has a certain number of "Mordechai's eyes".
These are strangely lively spheres embedded in the portraits, the number of which decreases by one with each movie played. When all the spheres are used up, you can (and I think this is brilliant) use a workbench to refill the "empty" portrait with the Eyes of Mordechai from another picture. This makes sense if you suspect a particular muse and want to neglect the others above it. Anyway, if you don't feed an exhausted canvas with new orbs, it will remain silent until the next night.
One thing I liked about the story part was the sophisticated writing. Because Lilith, Xavier & Co easily win every vagueness contest with their statements and thus let thick smoke rise above detectives heads. No, Murderous Muses is certainly not easy, especially since there is no tutorial, meaning the slightly cryptic mechanics have to be figured out on one's own. Personally, I like that Murderous Muses has confidence in me as a player, but an optional tutorial would certainly make the new D'Avekki thriller more accessible.
The other big plus for me was the elaborate balancing act between mysterious otherworld atmosphere and dry, sometimes delightfully infantile humor that never felt out of place. Atmosphere is a top priority in Murderous Muses, only the German subtitles to the original English audio are sometimes a bit off and should be improved.
Those familiar with D'Avekki Studios' FMV games might worry that the three-dimensional venue is more of an accessory, but that's not the case. Admittedly, the somewhat sparse venue looks poorly detailed and stale. This is also because the exaggeratedly high depth of field (which reminds me strongly of my shortsightedness) swallows up the few existing texture details. However, due to the otherworldly atmosphere and solid technology, I felt as involved here as I rarely do in a video game.
The layout as well as the individual rooms of the art gallery change every night and with every playthrough. Therefore, Sasha's orders can't be worked through mindlessly, since the positions of hanging places (both free and assigned) also vary. Which pictures and symbolic art objects (such as a huge Mordecai eye or a church tower bell) are actually in the exhibition is again determined randomly.
In addition, each exhibit has its own story, which is recited by an informational voice at the push of a button. Boring? Quite the opposite, in fact, because D'Avekki has noticeably invested a lot of time in elaborating the background story, which drips with mysticism. And there is also something to chuckle about every now and then, so that no button should be left out.
Anyway, the Mordechai exhibition also has optional, varying puzzles to offer, the solution of which unlocks locked rooms, for example. During my review play, I mostly faced nice association games or "Pairs"-like installations, which I enjoyed despite (or even because of) some opaqueness.
And because the surreal corridors of the exhibition also include fun features like a tips hotline in the shape of a classic London phone booth, I would definitely call D'Avekki's 3D debut a success. I was honestly even a bit surprised at how well the gallery part (including the flawless controls) worked. It all looked to me as if the British studio had secretly made a 3D game before. Maybe I should take a closer look at the credits of some well-known battle royale shooters.
If you're looking for a breath of fresh air in the murder mystery genre, Murderous Muses will serve you well and in a sophisticated way. D'Avekki's surreal crime thriller plays like a Sherlock Holmes adventure on cocaine, and thus right up the alley of the once drug-addicted master detective.
Nevertheless, the story doesn't leave reality altogether, so that even those who are less fond of paranormal settings should give the game a try. There are no fluttering bedsheets or shadowy Mordechais to be met in the gallery; rather, Murderous Muses feels like the cult TV series "The X-Files" from Dana Scully's perspective.
Apart from the visually outdated main setting, I admire almost everything about Murderous Muses. This also applies to the decent acting performance of those involved. On the other hand, the theoretically infinite replay value doesn't work for me, although the procedural game design actually allows for several meaningful playthroughs.
However, those only last for two or three hours at most, while I have played another D'Avekki game, The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, for more than 30 hours (and I'm not done with this game yet). I probably won't spend this many hours with Murderous Muses, as I simply prefer "handmade" hours of play over randomly generated ones.
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Wonderfully mysterious deduction game with high-quality FMV scenes and charismatic actors. If you don't mind the outdated visuals in some areas, you can experience not only one of the best D'Avekki games, but also one of the best FMV games to date.