Software Reviews

The Witness

A prose murder-mystery game for detectives whose business is trouble

Dennis Barker

Somebody was nuts. I was nuts. Everybody was nuts. None of it fitted together worth a nickel . . . . I was in bad with the police, I had spent ten dollars of my twenty expense money, and I didn't have enough leverage anywhere to lift a dime off a cigar counter.

-- Philip Marlowe, speaking in Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler

I can understand Marlowe's lament now that I've played The Witness, the second prose murder-mystery game from Infocom. I logged a considerable number of hours trying to crack this programmed puzzler, but the case remains unsolved, wide open, no good leads, no evidence that sticks. This is one mystery-game review you can read without worrying about the solution being revealed.

Stu Galley, the author of The Witness, has styled his prose after that of Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and other captains of the hard-boiled mystery. Galley, a programmer at Infocom, has apparently read enough of the genre to emulate the style without mocking it. The descriptions are well done -- quick but thorough and evocative. The narrative is detailed enough so that the player can imagine the surroundings but not have his mental picture cluttered with knickknacks. Because they provoke use of the imagination, the all-prose games are like the radio dramas of pretelevision days.

The story of The Witness begins: "Somewhere near Los Angeles. A cold Friday evening in February 1938." The player is the detective, dispatched by police chief Klutz to assist a nervous Mr. Linder, who says his life is being threatened by a somewhat sleazy Mr. Stiles. Linder's wife has recently killed herself. Stiles has allegedly been sending nasty notes.

A taxi drops you off at the Linder joint. The questions and decisions begin before you enter the house. Do you go to the front door? (Nah, too obvious.) Do you check out the garage? Do you stalk around the backyard? Remember, you have only 12 hours (720 moves) to solve the mystery, and every move kills a minute.

If you take the right steps, you can meet the main characters before they get away from the house. There's Freeman Linder, who's made millions in the Orient trade. There's his daughter Monica, a tough dame who acts "as though you were a masher who just gave her a whistle." There's Phong, the mysterious butler. And there's Stiles, who apparently was on very good terms with the late Mrs. Linder and allegedly wants Mr. Linder to join her in that Big Sleep.

The best detectives operate in a mode that balances logic and instinct. The Witness gives you plenty of opportunity to exercise both. You can minimize dead ends by keeping a list of questions asked and responses received. I sketched each room as it was described. Because the Linder house is big, I had to make lots of maps. However, the maps I drew were not much help. Despite an effort to diagram the layout of the place and to chart my steps, I frequently ran into walls and windows. This can be a problem when you're trying to shadow someone. At one point, I gave up mapping and relied on instinct, luck, and the handy LOOK AROUND command, which flashes a description of the surroundings on the screen. I have yet to determine if the trouble is due to a bug in the program or in the player.

Infocom's parser, the program's language analyzer, is obviously a remarkable improvement on the simple two-word verb-noun commands of earlier adventure games. A player can interact with The Witness on a more articulate basis, which makes for a greater sense of realism. Despite this remarkable addition of adjectives, prepositions, indirect objects, and compound verbs, I still felt considerably limited in the vocabulary I could use. The rule book points out that the parser uses far more words than it understands, but when you're onto a hot lead, with clues and questions running through your mind, it's hard to remember that you're talking to a computer program. Generally, the linguistic limitations cause only a minor inconvenience; you may have to rephrase a question until the parser understands. But in a few cases the restrictions impede the detective work. Here's a perfect example.

I asked one character to please tell me about Monica and her father. The program informed me that I couldn't use multiple indirect objects with the word "tell." This is an unfortunate snag. A detective dealing with several characters, particularly characters who are suspect, would want to know about the relationships between them. It's a line of questioning that can help reveal motives, and unearthing motives is what investigation is all about. Certain grammatical constructions are important to the detective of a programmed mystery.

The game's designers have provided some very helpful commands. The ones I used most frequently, besides the usual legwork commands (e.g., WALK WEST), were EXAMINE, which lets you look closely at something; ANALYZE, which includes checking for specific substances and fingerprinting; and SEARCH (something or someone), to which some characters do not react favorably. And as Holmes had his Watson, you have Sgt. Duffy, who can be called in for assistance. Duffy can handle analysis, booking, questioning, and other tasks -- if you can find him. Failing that, you can still shout obscenities and even shoot at characters. (Galley anticipated certain input statements and apparently expected some players to get very frustrated.)

The Witness, in the Infocom tradition, is attractively packaged. The National Detective Gazette, the main piece of documentation, is cleverly and clearly written and features some nice illustrations. The graphic artists involved in this project deserve a round of applause. The reference card is straightforward and explains booting and playing procedures in terms simple enough to be followed by the village idiot. This is commendable.

Playing time varies greatly. Infocom games have reportedly taken from 20 to 60 hours (real time). You can play The Witness for five minutes if you like, store your game position, and resume the investigation later. If you arrest a character judged innocent by the grand jury (it takes a lot of evidence to convince the jurors), the session is ended for you. Wrong moves can be counted against you. Think before you act; think again before you enlist the steel.

Frustration is a part of this game. Questions multiply, answers are scarce. Hours after suspending play, you might find yourself evaluating a move you made or pondering that response a suspect made. How often have you played Monopoly and then wondered hours later why you didn't buy Baltic Avenue?

Remarkably, The Witness gives you an idea of the sort of situations an investigator is up against. Dropped into a situation in which a crime has been committed, you have to decide what questions to ask and whom to ask. You have to determine who's lying and who's got something to hide. You have to make assumptions about people you've only recently met. And your approach is based on scant clues: a note, a matchbook, a trace of gunpowder, a conflicting statement. Kojak never had it so rough. Of course, there is one big difference between being a detective and playing an adventure game. Real-life detectives sometimes must look down the barrel of a gun; the game player only has to look down the tube of a video display.

No law-abiding gumshoe likes a dead end, a lying suspect, or a stiff. But these are the elements of a good mystery and a good mystery game. Galley and the Infocom staff have succeeded in designing what Sherlock Holmes would call "a three-pipe problem."

A Tip

If you begin to feel as if the district attorney is breathing down your neck, everyone's lying to you, and the Scotch is starting to taste sour, you probably need some help. An Invisiclues booklet contains some hints that might assist your investigation. It costs $7.95 and comes with a special pen that lets you reveal clues one at a time. To order, telephone (800) 262-6868; in New Jersey, (800) 238-2200. Above all, keep cool. And remember: it's Chinatown, Jake.

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