Pride and Prejudice and Murder
By Abigail Fuller and Michael Gray
“His wife, Louisa was similarly detached from life, and took her pleasure primarily in loo and gossip.”
This is a good starting point for how my reviews will generally go. I’m planning on always starting with a line that I liked, or stood out to me. Something that might have sold the game to me, as long as I had the context. This line illustrates a few things. I laughed at what I assumed was toilet humor, but without knowing anything about Jane Austen I couldn’t be sure. So, I researched if ‘in loo’ was a typo (or better yet, an intended typo) of ‘in lieu’ or if this was a common joke for Austen. Apparently, neither. Loo is a card game that seemed popular at the time. So, I lost my toilet humor, but gained my second favorite thing… random trivia.
For context, I have not read Pride and Prejudice and am only very slightly familiar with Jane Austen at all. Take that into consideration when reading this review. I’ll always make an attempt to keep reviews as spoiler-free as possible, and will give plenty of warning if I believe I need to point something out that may spoil portions of the game.
Now for the general breakdown of categories I’ll be including:
General Story - Does the theme work, is it an interesting concept? Are there glaring issues?
Format and Typos - How readable is the title? Do I have any personal issues with the format? Grammar is only ever mentioned if it hampers readability. I’ll try to report typos, but mostly I’ll bring this up if there are too many to ignore or if there seems to be some coding issues.
Game Mechanics and Stats - Do they make sense and add to the experience? These are public mechanics that you can easily see by going to your Stats screen, and possibly a few bits about the actual code.
Replayability - Is there a reason to replay the title? I’ll talk a little bit about variability in routes, and romance options.
Bullet Point Dislikes
Bullet Point Likes
Apologies for the quick primer, but on to the review for Pride and Prejudice and Murder.
General Story:
The story is, of course, about pride and prejudice… but with a murder mystery tacked on. Perspectives change throughout the story, but one thing I found that I really liked was that while murder mysteries always feel like deductions, the focus here was social class deduction. The ‘whodunnit’ was more focused on the ‘why’. Deductions were made with understanding why and how an action might affect social standing. There was no second thought really given to the criminal consequences of anything. Plenty of humor in the title with some masterclass snark in thought and dialogue.
Format and Typos:
If you are here for a novel, this will feel fine. There are long pages of descriptive texts, large paragraphs for descriptions, and characters are well organized when it comes to conversations. I never had a problem discerning who was speaking.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
As above, this is a novel with very little in the way of stats. It feels less like a game and much more in line with ‘if you want to do this, turn to page ##’ choice book. No gamification of stats, but this is also because you don’t really play a character. You take a narrative perspective of already existing characters within the story. When you make choices, the game does not check against stats for a success or failure status. The game portion revolves around deduction puzzles in multiple choice where success is an achievement and failure is being rerouted back to the correct answer without the achievement.
Replayability:
There are a few various paths to take. Given making the correct choices at certain points within the game, it appears there are four different endings. This is not a game that includes romance options.
Dislikes:
- Some of the puzzles, like a cypher style puzzle, seem out of place for the setting.
- Very linear early on. Most choices only change how you choose to say the same thing.
- Choices later on mostly decide who becomes your narrator.
Likes:
- Oh, the snark. It is absolutely on point. I chose the line up top as one that stood out, but I had a super long list of lines that had me rolling.
- The social deduction involved in determining the motives was super interesting.
- It makes me want to read Pride and Prejudice, which… bravo. You succeeded where my high school English classes did not.