The Mystery Cartridge

10 Things Every Mystery Game Player Does Without Realizing It Whether you're sitting on the couch with a controller in your hands or sitting around a table with a handful of friends, there is something fundamentally different about playing a mystery game. You're not just playing a game. You're investigating. You're looking for patterns. You're watching people. You're remembering tiny details that seemed completely irrelevant five minutes ago. And you're suspicious of everyone. Everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're playing a detective game on your Nintendo Switch, sitting around a table playing Clue, participating in a murder-mystery party, or trying to figure out which of your friends is secretly lying during a tabletop RPG. Give someone a mystery and something strange happens. They become a detective. Not necessarily a good detective. But a detective. And after playing enough mystery games, you start developing certain habits. You may not even...

 You Never Experience a Story the Same Way Twice There is a strange idea we have about entertainment. We talk about movies, television shows, books, and video games as though they exist in a vacuum. As though there is a definitive experience waiting for us, and if two people consume the same thing, they should more or less feel the same way about it. They don't. They can't. Because you never experience a story with an empty head. You bring everything you've ever watched, read, played, loved, hated, misunderstood, and obsessed over with you. And that's not a flaw. That's the point. Nothing Exists in a Vacuum Take The Hunger Games . Millions of people watched it. Many loved it. It introduced audiences to a dystopian world in which young people are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses. But what if you had already seen Battle Royale ? What if you had watched The Running Man ? What if you had read Lord of the Flies ? Suddenly, The Hunger Games...

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe We were promised a biting examination of video games, free will, choice, and the meaning of life. What we got was a game that eventually convinced one of us to take a nap. Platform: Nintendo Switch Genre: Walking Simulator / Interactive Comedy / Philosophical Satire Developer: Crows Crows Crows Publisher: Crows Crows Crows Release Date: April 27, 2022 Players: 1 Time to Finish: The end is never the end is never the end is never the end Mystery Cartridge Classification: PALETTE CLEANSER Rating: CLOSE THE FILE — NOT RECOMMENDED The Case We went into The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe with a very specific purpose. We needed a palette cleanser. After spending time with murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, investigations, and games where somebody is almost invariably having a terrible day, we figured it would be nice to play something completely different. And The Stanley Parable seemed perfect. It's funny. It's clever. It's supp...

Why We Love Stories That Hurt Us Why haven't they made a game starring Dolph Lundgren called "I must break you" yet? Let's be honest. We know what we're doing. We pick up a game, start a new story, meet the characters, become emotionally invested in their lives, and then, somewhere in the back of our minds, there's a little voice saying: "This is probably going to hurt, isn't it? I am going to spend days playing this and then something will happen and I'll drop the controller and just stare at the wall, or the screen, and just be heartbroken." And we keep playing. We want it to hurt. That's one of the strangest things about storytelling. We don't necessarily seek out stories because they'll make us happy. Sometimes we actively seek out stories that we know are going to break our hearts. We watch movies that make us cry. We read books that leave us emotionally wrecked. We listen to songs that remind us of people we'd rather no...

Clue Sometimes the best way to solve a murder is to invite everyone into the same house, give them weapons, and let absolute chaos take over. Platform: Beyond the Cartridge Genre: Mystery / Comedy / Murder Mystery Director: Jonathan Lynn Starring: Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren Release Date: December 13, 1985 Runtime: 94 minutes Based On: The Clue board game Mystery Cartridge Rating: OPEN THE FILE — RECOMMENDED The Case In honor of Tim Curry, we decided to revisit Clue . And honestly, there may not be a better way to remember him. Curry was one of those actors who could walk into a scene and immediately make it feel like his scene. He could be terrifying, flamboyant, ridiculous, sinister, charming, or all of those things simultaneously. As Wadsworth, the butler in Clue , he gets to be all of them. And then he gets to spend the last ten minutes of the movie running around a mansion at approximately th...

The 25 Unspoken Rules Every Video Game Player Knows There was nothing behind this waterfall. There are no official rules for playing video games. Nobody hands you a rulebook when you buy a console. There is no international gaming organization that sends representatives to your house to make sure you're playing correctly. And yet, somehow, we all know. We know that when a game tells us there is a point of no return, we immediately panic. We know that if an NPC says, "Follow me," they are about to walk at exactly the wrong speed (and a bunch of bad guys will appear to impede your progress). We know that when a character says they'll meet us somewhere later, they will stand in that exact location for the next three weeks without eating, sleeping, or questioning their life choices. These are not official rules. But they are rules. Somewhere along the way, every gamer learns them. Welcome to The 25 Unspoken Rules Every Video Game Player Knows. Rule #1: If It Glows, Pick I...

The Life Is Strange TV Show Has One Very Strange Problem: What Happens When the Viewer Can't Choose? There is a fundamental problem facing the people making the upcoming Life Is Strange television series for Prime Video. And it isn't the casting. It isn't the special effects. It isn't even the question of whether Tatum Grace Hopkins can make us believe she is Max Caulfield or whether Maisy Stella can capture Chloe Price. The problem is much more basic: What happens when you take a game about choice and remove the player's ability to choose? The original Life Is Strange was released in 2015 and built much of its identity around the idea that the person holding the controller was part of the story. Max Caulfield could rewind time, but the player was the one deciding when to use that power, what mistakes to undo, which conversations to approach differently, and, ultimately, who would live and who would die. Now Amazon MGM Studios, Square Enix, Story Kitchen, and Luck...

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance Sometimes solving the mystery isn't enough, you have to figure out how to solve it differently. Platform: Nintendo Switch Genre: Point-and-Click Adventure / Visual Novel Developer: Cherrymochi Publisher: UNTIES Release Date: November 7, 2019 Players: 1 Time to Finish: Approximately 5 hours for a single run; 8–12+ hours if you're chasing additional endings Mystery Cartridge Rating: OPEN THE FILE — RECOMMENDED The Case There are mystery games where you follow the clues, solve the puzzle, watch the ending, and put the controller down. And then there are mystery games that finish, look you directly in the eye, and essentially say: "Okay. But what if you'd made a different decision?" Tokyo Dark: Remembrance is very much the second kind. We played the Nintendo Switch version, and while it isn't quite going to make our list of the absolute best games we've played, we had a genuinely good time with it. It's a dark, strange, som...