This review contains spoilers.
This is a slasher game.
So unless it were absolutely dreadful, there was very little chance I wasn't going to recommend it.
Thank you to Nick Silencer for providing me with a copy through Steam Curator Connect.
I actually played it as soon as I received it last December.
Then the updates kept coming.
Turns out it was in Early Access.
So I played it again while preparing this review.
Everything I'm writing here is based on the current build.
Anyway.
The basic premise is that a group of rather stupid influencers head to a campsite in Louisiana to find out whether the ghost of a serial killer is real.
Then the player murders them one by one using a selection of increasingly imaginative methods.
It's basically slasher horror combined with crafting.
Most horror games put you in the role of the survivor.
The antagonist is the killer.
Or the ghost.
Or the monster.
Something hostile and threatening that wants to hurt you.
Games where you are the killer seem considerably less common.
Perhaps that's inevitable.
Once you're the predator rather than the prey, it's rather difficult to be frightened.
I've recently become friends with someone online through a rather unexpected connection.
They're into necrophilia.
Fictional game characters only, obviously.
Anyway.
They spend an extraordinary amount of time playing games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 as a murderer, wandering around killing people.
And afterwards...
Mm.
That's enough about that.
My point is that the freedom to play as a killer usually seems to appear in games with broad player freedom rather than dedicated horror games.
I also remember an old mobile Scream game from the period when smartphones were still relatively new and things like Angry Birds were taking over the world.
You could play as Ghostface and murder everyone in a level without being spotted.
That was basically the entire game.
Stealth.
Kill everybody.
Don't get caught.
It wasn't particularly interesting.
There wasn't much horror.
There weren't really survivors in the slasher sense.
There wasn't much of a story either.
So in that respect, Five Mysterious Murders already occupies a fairly unusual little corner of the genre.
It gives me the killer.
It gives me victims.
It gives them personalities and a reason to be there.
It gives me a slasher story.
And then it lets me control the slasher.
That's already quite a lot in its favour.
If the influencers take more than five photographs of me, apparently the FBI will arrive and imprison me at Area 51 forever.
Mm.
Good.
The FBI are certainly capable of being frightening.
Bursting through the doors of elderly people's birthday parties, causing absolute chaos and then mysteriously disappearing again.
Still.
Being locked away at Area 51 might not be so bad.
Perhaps I could make some new alien friends.
Certainly a better ending than simply being shot dead by the police.
From the killer's point of view.
Come to think of it, I suppose the game makes more sense if it's set before 2025.
If it took place after 2025, the survivors could upload all the photographs they liked to Ghostagram and everyone would probably respond:
"Eww. AI slop."
Mm.
Times have changed.
That must make life even more irritating for modern horror-film protagonists.
"Police? There's a murderer here. He's chasing me. Look, I even took a photo."
"Mm. Looks AI-generated. Please stop making prank calls."
"It's not AI! It's real!"
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Anyway.
If they do photograph you, you can visit the computer at the Ranger's Station and delete the uploaded pictures.
You can also use it to spy on their livestream and see where everyone is and what they're doing.
Fortunately, the Ranger's Station and various other locations can be reached quickly through the game's fast-travel system.
I liked that.
It keeps the game moving without making all the travelling needlessly tedious.
And once the survivors become a little more intelligent in the full release, I think the simple voyeuristic act of watching their livestream to see what they're doing could become a pretty good game mechanic in itself.
You're the killer.
They're wandering around somewhere out there.
And you're watching.
Waiting.
Planning.
That has potential.
The tutorial is quite friendly too.
The problem, at least for me, is that many of the quests that follow are effectively extended tutorials teaching you different ways to murder people.
So after learning the basic controls, I stopped bothering with most of them.
I hate puzzles.
What I mean is that the more elaborate the murder method, the more preparation and materials it tends to require.
So I mostly stuck with the simplest and most iconic option available.
Yes.
Stabbing people with a knife.
So, in practice, you can finish the game just by stabbing everyone with a knife.
How much reason you have to replay it will probably come down to personal taste.
For me, almost none.
However I go about it, once I've killed all of them, I've finished the game.
Which is why I think the developer should add Steam achievements as soon as possible.
Give me an achievement for each of those more inventive methods of killing a survivor.
That doesn't mean I ignored everything else.
During my first playthrough, I used the Angry Rat and then finished someone off with a Pit Trap.
During my second, I found a chainsaw lying around at Home, Sweet Home and butchered Alice with it.
Making a chainsaw normally requires several ingredients that aren't particularly easy to find.
This one was already assembled.
Lucky me.
Hooray.
The Angry Rat and Pit Trap combination was a little less convincing.
You attack a sleeping girl, shove a broken bottle into her mouth and let a rat eat her insides.
The whole thing looks disturbingly suggestive.
Quite obscene.
Quite gory.
Excellent idea.
The problem is what happens afterwards.
The Angry Rat deals 95% damage.
So when the animation ended, my victim still had 5% health remaining.
She simply sat there.
Then she took out some crisps and started eating them.
Apparently having a rat eat your insides is survivable as long as the health bar says 5%.
I needed to remove the remaining health, so I used a Pit Trap.
She fell into the hole while eating her crisps, complained that she'd hurt her foot and then abruptly died.
Mm.
Yes.
This is still Early Access, so I can understand why some of these systems are a little rough.
The knife and chainsaw worked considerably better.
I was also slightly disappointed that the corpses seem to look the same regardless of how somebody dies.
Knife.
Pit Trap.
Chainsaw.
The final body looks essentially identical.
Yandere Simulator changes the appearance of corpses depending on how the victim was killed.
I'd quite like to see something similar here eventually.
Near Old Hag's Farm, I found an item called the Old Hag's House Key.
I picked it up.
I still couldn't enter the nearby house.
I also gave up trying to reach Cannibals Island.
I couldn't work out how to get there.
Perhaps I'm supposed to build a boat?
I looked through the crafting menu and couldn't see any way to make one.
It doesn't particularly matter.
You don't seem to need to visit it in order to finish the current game.
The basic objective is:
Kill them all.
Your targets consist of five people and one dog.
Although apparently you don't actually have to kill the dog to finish the game.
I couldn't stab the dog with my knife either.
Fine.
Once all five people are dead, the ending begins.
The police arrive and initially report five corpses.
Then:
"Hold on, one is still alive!"
And the game asks you to choose the survivor yourself.
I chose Alice.
She looked the most like a Final Girl.
One of the weaker parts at the moment is the behaviour of the survivors.
When attacked, they don't put up much resistance.
They don't seem particularly interested in running away either.
Fortunately, this is something the developer already acknowledges on the Steam page.
The plan is to make the player's opponents intelligent enough to become serious competition rather than, in the developer's own words, mere "punching bags".
So I'll keep the Early Access status firmly in mind here.
There was one other thing I was particularly interested in.
One of the official screenshots quite openly shows Alice and Tony in a blatantly suggestive pose at the campsite.
I was impressed.
"You actually implemented that particular horror-film cliché?
This developer has clearly watched a few horror films."
Except I couldn't get it to happen.
I watched their livestream for ages.
Nothing.
I wondered whether I was supposed to drop a condom nearby.
I couldn't drop it.
I even killed everyone except Alice and Tony.
Still nothing.
Come to think of it, the survivors don't seem particularly bothered when they discover the bodies of their dead friends either.
They don't call the police.
They don't abandon the livestream.
They just carry on.
Mm.
Well.
That can happen.
It's Early Access.
Again, Yandere Simulator already has systems where students who discover a corpse react to it and contact the police.
I actually think playing some Yandere Simulator might give the developer quite a few useful ideas for how these systems could develop.
And Early Access is important here.
The developer says the current version isn't even half of what they ultimately want the game to become.
More locations are planned.
More characters.
More story-driven mechanics.
Smarter survivors.
The final chapter isn't even available yet.
The current ending quite literally says:
TO BE CONTINUED
Apparently, the full release is still some way off.
Anyway.
Five Mysterious Murders feels like a thoroughly American, appropriately messy B-movie slasher.
I also liked that every time you begin a new game, you get to give The Movie its own title.
That's a nice touch.
It's already quite fun.
More importantly, it's a slasher game where I actually get to be the slasher.
There aren't nearly enough of those.
I'm curious to see what it becomes by the time it reaches full release.
Next, I think I'll probably review either Metro 2033 Redux or Skyrim.
I'm not sure which one will come first.
I bought Metro 2033 Redux around Christmas last year.
It was heavily discounted.
I looked at it for about five seconds, decided it seemed like my sort of thing and then left it sitting in my library.
I've just looked at the Steam page again.
The horror tag sitting there in plain sight.
And the About This Game section too.
And now I'm wondering:
"Why haven't I played this yet?"
Anyway.
I'm looking forward to it.
Five Mysterious Murders.
Metro 2033 Redux.
Skyrim.
All three of them.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3275460/Five_Mysterious_Murders/?curator_clanid=46578905