Why Have Mystery Games Stayed In the Realm of Point-and-Click?

[Platituder]

Yes, yes, L.A. Noire, but if anything, it just reaffirms my point. Although some of the game mechanics felt a bit contrived, the characters were uninteresting and the overall product felt fairly inelegant, I felt that at its core it was a great experience, and if better implemented, could have become more popular. So why hasn't anyone tried since? Personally, I would love a hardcore mystery game, where one is able to misstep without being immediately smacked in the face by the game and then shuffled back on course. Sure, scouring for clues may be a bit difficult to balance, but I feel that even that could be done.

EDIT: Christ, I used the word "felt" waaaaaaay too much. Sorry.

 

[Malbourne]

EDIT: Christ, I used the word "felt" waaaaaaay too much. Sorry.

I dunno if this comes off as snarky, but I think "felt" is a suitable word for it. Detective games should have that tactile experience of rifling through crime scenes, searching for evidence. Point-and-click is a pretty archaic way of doing it, IMO, but it gets the job done: you hunt for clues and pick them out. There are more in-depth ways of gathering evidence, like in Condemned, where you used different instruments to find important stuff in the environment and on bodies. It felt like you were a part of the process!

 

[shrekfan246]

"Tried since"?

L.A. Noire was only released three years ago. In fact, that's more recent than the first example which came to my mind, which was the Persona series. Admittedly in Persona it's more of a mystery plotline rather than the player actively searching out clues, but that kinda brings us around to the answer: Because searching for clues is a gameplay style best suited to adventure games. Or puzzle games. Danganronpa; Phoenix Wright; 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward; Professor Layton; they're all games focused around mysteries in one way or another. But yeah, even L.A. Noire was basically a point&click, just dressed up in an open-world third-person action-adventure skin, because having gameplay centered around solving things just... doesn't really engender itself to other more action-focused genres.

 

[dyre]

Damned point-and-click haters!

Point and click is a genre that allows the developers to concentrate on storytelling rather than gameplay. I've never programmed a game, but it seems to me that making action gameplay involves a lot of programming; you need complex models and textures with hitboxes, lots of scripts for the weapons/bleeding/explosions/etc, a full three dimensional environment, a game engine that can handle all that...

That sort of extra work might hamper a developer with limited resources (many mystery games don't seem to be blessed with very high budgets) who wants to tell a large, complex story with a lot of moving parts, which mystery games often are, given their emphasis on finding clues and learning about what characters are hiding.

That said, it would be cool to see some mystery games that include gameplay. There used to be a modder called Puce Moose who made some first-rate Fallout 3 and Fallout NV mods, some of which were mystery themed with a bit of action. I'd definitely be up for playing something like that if it came out standalone