Suspect: Won!

The first thing I discovered, on re-searching the house, the crime scene in particular, was that in Veronica's mask, a single dark hair was caught in the silver mesh. Only the women show their hair at the party, but Veronica's is blonde, Linda's red, and Alicia's, as I suspected might be, dark. The detective would analyze this when asked, showing that it matches Alicia's, and had been pulled out, not cut. This evidence, along with suspicion cast on Cochrane from showing the incomplete P&S document in the office and his threatening note, took the detective's heat off me, and he'd spend the rest of the night and morning mulling over things in the ballroom as the party died down.

Asking him to arrest Alicia causes an acquittal, and not too subtly hints that you're on the right track but failed to discover/prove a motive. Curiously, in the epilogue, the detective solves the case and makes the correct arrest despite the double jeopardy clause - is Alicia innocent after all, or is this just a scripting oversight?

Further evidence-based interrogations:

• Michael is totally uncooperative. On showing him the page he tore out of the trust folder, with his name on it, he protests "I have no idea what this has to do with me."
• When showing Ostmann the P&S agreement, he confirms its authenticity, that Veronica wished to move further upcountry to more suitable land for raising horses, and adds that she surprised him by insisting on putting off the signing until after finishing some business.
• Marston says the same concerning the agreement. When confronted about the trust folder, he remorselessly admits to fleecing the Ashcroft estate, threatening a libel suit should you print anything.
• Cochrane all but cackles at Ostmann's misfortune, certain that Michael will sell now. He confirms the business card warning is his own, delivered under the door at 7:45, but denies any malicious intent. For now I believe him.
• Alicia only responds to being presented with her own overcoat and hair sample, and only with righteous indignation.
• The detective happily accepts the trust folder and missing page as evidence, but isn't impressed with Alicia's wet overcoat. He will not fingerprint the lariat, bullet, or fairy mask when asked to, bizarrely stating that it wouldn't reveal anything.

 

The fact that the command to fingerprint items is even recognized, strange as it may be that he can't be bothered with the actual murder weapon, told me this ought to be useful somewhere. This wouldn't have occurred to me at all if the command had worked on the lariat and bullet but revealed no prints but my own. When I asked him to fingerprint Veronica's broken glass, the results were productive indeed.

...partial prints were recovered from a dry area. These were compared with prints of Veronica Ashcroft taken by Sergeant Duffy at the beginning of his investigation. It is our conclusion that the prints on the glass are not those of Veronica Ashcroft."

 

Ah ha! Things are taking shape - before 9:00, Michael killed Veronica with my lariat, taken from the closet, and ransacked the room, taking the accountant's papers. Either he or Alicia pickpocketed a costume bullet to plant as evidence. "Veronica," seen at 9:00, was really Alicia, either wearing Veronica's costume or a nearly identical one. At 9:02, she spills her drink, retreats to the office, plants her mask by Veronica's body, and gets out, ditching the costume for her coat and whichever pieces of the harem costume couldn't be worn under the fairy queen gown. Then she shows up soaking wet at 9:18.

A few things still don't make sense to me, though, but I suspect these are nitpicks unimportant to the mystery's solution:

• Veronica must have been killed after the party started, but why was she in her office and not hosting the party?
• Alicia, I assume, must have arrived at the house before the party started, but how could she have avoided being seen by anyone? And her coat must have been on the premises or else she'd be wet from the rain, but where could she have kept it, unseen and retrievable?
  
• Alicia can be seen in disguise on her way to the office by 9:09pm. The rain slows at 9:10. What time did she leave the house and get her coat soaking wet?
• How could Michael have ensured nobody saw Veronica's body too early, especially with Asher sitting right there outside the office?
• Why did Michael leave the P&S alone while ransacking everything else?
  
• Why did Veronica put off the signing of the agreement?

 

I still needed some more proof, though. At this point, asking the detective to arrest Michael and Alicia works, and the detective says the evidence is almost enough for a conviction, but not quite, as Alicia wasn't present until after the murder.

I've got to digress again. How does he know when the murder happened? The body isn't discovered until after 10:00, well after Alicia showed up. And if he does know precisely when, thanks to the detective's magic portable crime lab or whatever, then shouldn't he know it happened before "Veronica's" last sighting, therefore blowing up Michael's alibi?

Anyway, I was pretty sure that the solution to Alicia's alibi involved her wet coat, even though this seemed unsatisfying. Just because her coat was wet doesn't prove she had been here before it stopped raining - maybe a car splashed her driving through a puddle? Maybe it got soaked getting into her car at home?

Unable to figure out how to work with the limitations of Infocom's parser communicate this to the detective, I looked at a walkthrough for the first and only  time, which confirmed my thoughts. The solution is to first observe the rain slowing, and then tell detective about the weather; a conversational verbiage which hadn't occurred to me given the mechanical nature of commands that typically pass as valid in these games.

 

The game was pretty much over, but just for completion sake, I used trial and error to determine precisely what evidence is required to convict Michael and Alicia:

• Show the detective Alicia's coat to cast doubt on her alibi.
  
• Tell the detective about the weather, having observed it earlier, to establish Alicia's opportunity.
• Fingerprint the glass to establish Alicia's means.
• Get the investment sheet from the fire to establish Michael's motive.

 

The rest of the clues are required too, just because:

• Alicia's hair analysis
  
• The trust folder from Michael's BMW
• The manila folder in the office
• Cochrane's business card, for some reason
  

 

If you have all of the evidence from the first list but fail to produce even one of the items the second, the detective will tell you that you don't have enough evidence, but provide no other hints. Get all the evidence, and you can have him arrest both.

Sergeant Duffy seems to read your thoughts, as he appears with Michael and Alicia in handcuffs. "Let's not have any trouble, now," says Sergeant Duffy, in his unique way. They head for the driveway, where a police car waits with engine purring.

Congratulations! Your testimony as star witness for the prosecution secures the conviction of Michael for the first degree murder of his wife, and of Alicia as his accomplice. Not only are they sent to prison with the proverbial key thrown away, but Colonel Marston is convicted in a parallel case of embezzlement and grand theft for his role in the milking of the family Trust.

Best of all, your syndicated twelve-part story of the tangled plot and its aftermath wins the Pulitzer Prize, and the book is number one on the bestseller lists for 42 weeks! (Not to mention the movie and book club sales.)

 

A further epilogue explains the who and how, but nothing I didn't already know.

GAB rating: Good, but it could have been better, and though I enjoyed the game, the conclusion still left me dissatisfied, and I fear I must dwell on Suspect's shortcomings more than its merits.

I really like the concept of Infocom's mystery games, and have to be impressed with how well realized the concept works in an engine meant for a game about treasure hunting and puzzle solving. Zork, like Adventure before it, was about exploring static and mostly hermetic puzzle rooms in search of treasure. All three Infocom mysteries have natural locations to explore, close integration between gameplay and plot, and multiple characters who walk around the place and react to ingame events, to you, and to each other.

But each game has its problems. The first, Deadline, is easily the best of them in terms of the actual mystery. The sequence of events is well thought out, evidence is tricky but logical, and puzzling out what happened is challenging. The critical path, though, feels arbitrary, obscure, and narrow, requiring very unintuitive actions to secure a conviction even if you've more or less figured the mystery out. The Witness is much more reasonable to solve, and even offers multiple solutions, but goes too far in correcting Deadline's faults and becomes rather trivial to solve (and personally annoys me by designating the less complete solution to be the correct one).

Suspect's difficulty falls between Deadline and Witness, as indicated on the box, but I felt it was still too easy, and the mystery is less mechanically interesting and more poorly thought out than either predecessor. Interrogating the wide array of suspects and hearing what they have to say about each other and the evidence is good fun, but turned out to be unnecessary to the solution. All you have to do is find all of the pieces of incriminati, two of them attained by the now tired convention of hiding behind an object while a suspicious character does something they don't want you to see - and present them to the detective. Consequently, it doesn't do that much with the angle of playing a framed everyman instead of a detective, and given that the detective will do whatever you ask him to, you might as well had just been playing as a detective again.

I wish that Lebling had thought out a precise pre media res timeline and committed to it better, because what's presented here is fuzzy and inconsistent. I'd have done more to ensure that Alicia can't be followed at the start, as it creates a big plot hole if you do. Even though ingame events will delay you for a few minutes, you can still follow her as far as the front hall and go into the office minutes later. It's even possible to get to the office before she does, causing Veronica's body to magically materialize one turn later. Maybe Alicia should have just been removed once she walks out of sight, and then have the southern office door locked from the inside, both delaying you and suggesting an escape route from the north door, and adding some evidence of this escape and costume change, which you'd need to find and puzzle out for yourself.

Suspect's shortcomings, unlike Deadline and Witness, didn't hurt my enjoyment so much as it made me wish for what might have been - I don't think Infocom ever truly returned to this formula even in their later mystery-themed games - and I still recommend it as their best categorical effort.

Also, can I just say, this might just be Infocom's ugliest cover art of all time.

Game 341: Suspect

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=suspect

 

Get Frotz (if native Windows execution is your wish) here:
http://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html

 

I've noticed that outside of the Zork trilogy, Infocom often did not have their implementors stay in their element. Case in point, Suspect, the third mystery-styled adventure, continues a three game trend of never assigning the same designer twice. This time, after veteran designer Marc Blank's Deadline, and newcomer Stu Galley's Witness, Blank's collaborator on Zork & Enchanter Dave Lebling takes the digital quill.

This time, we're no detective, but a nosy journalist covering the biggest high society Halloween shindig of the season. This means no magic portable crime lab, no help from Sergeant Duffy, and, as the box tells us, no help or sympathy from the upper crust guests when a socialite gets deaded and the evidence points at you.

Feelies in the box, a crucial element to the mystery in prior games, are a bit more frugal here. No dossiers, lab reports, photos, or statements this time - after all, the crime is scheduled to occur ingame, but it's disappointing that there's so little opportunity to do any pre-sleuthing before booting up the game. Included are:

• An informally-written memo from the editor-in-chief who recommends making a story of the festivities, suggesting an angle of old money families seeking respite from expanding suburbia.
• A two-page "Maryland Rambler" article, referenced in the memo, regarding the ongoing yuppification of ultra-wealthy Montgomery County, MD, how the local blue bloods are rapidly selling off their huge and extremely valuable plots of land to the incoming D.C. upstarts to be used as single-family house plots instead of ranches and fox hunting grounds, often to the great benefit of elite real-estatier William Cochrane.
• Also from Maryland Rambler, a brief article on the opulent Halloween bash at Ashcroft Farm, to be hosted by Ashcroft heiress Veronica Ashcroft-Wellman. Talk of the sweeping changes to Montgomery Country are certain to be on the minds of the hundreds of visiting dignitaries, and Colonel Robert Marston, family trustee, is quoted here saying that Veronica sees a threat to the Ashcroft way of light, but will have many sympathetic ears for the night.
• A rental receipt for one cowboy costume from "Costumes Unlimited."
• William Cochrane's business card, with a threatening note to Veronica scribbled on the reverse.
• Lastly, the game instructions, taking the form of a firmly tongue-in-cheek guide to murder party etiquette, advising the well-bred murderer or murderess on everything from the importance of accepting invitations with hand-written letters in the third person (a phone call, after all, rudely leaves no physical evidence) to how to command dignity and respect in maximum security.
  

It's Halloween night. Veronica Ashcroft and her mania for Halloween parties are putting new twists on a 110-year-old tradition. It isn't a very nice night for a party. The rain has been pelting down since early morning, but the weather hasn't deterred many guests. The ballroom at Ashcroft Farm is filled with oddly costumed visitors. The rather ridiculous western outfit you are wearing was the only thing you could find at the costumer's on such short notice, but it's out of place only for its relative sobriety and taste in this crowd.


 

Suspect opens in the packed Ashcroft ballroom at 9:00pm, where costumed partygoers dine, wine, dance, and gossip as an orchestra plays. Recognizable characters here include:

• Johnson, the bartender, busy and wearing a domino mask.
• Samuel Ostmann, unmentioned in the materials, as a vampire.
• Michael Wellman as a sheik
• Veronica Ashcroft-Williams as a fairy queen

 

Other characters encountered elsewhere:

• Colonel Marston, as an African explorer
• William Cochrane, as an astronaut
• Linda Meade, as a ballerina
  
• An unidentified werewolf
• Alicia Barron, as a harem girl
• Smythe, the butler, as a gorilla
• Senator Asher, as a harlequin
  
• A suspicious doberman
  

 

Michael gestures to join him and Veronica, but that's not how I ever start a game. I went exploring and Trizborting, keeping tabs on the script for any out-of-timeline clues.

The mansion and its grounds, consisting of at at least 55 interconnected rooms (not counting the upstairs rooms which are cordoned off and off limits to guests), is much larger than Witness and feels much larger than Deadline's.

• The enormous ballroom, consisting of nine separate areas on a 3x3 grid, is central to the mansion, and has guests constantly entering, walking about, and leaving.
• To the north is the dining room and kitchen, and the back door and porch, from where you can walk around the house to the garden and patio.
• East of the ballroom, large French doors lead to the patio and pond.
• A long hall west of the ballroom has the dining room at the north end, a coat closet in the middle, and a library at the south end.
• The hall continues east to the pond, and has a bathroom and sun room.
• The front hall, south of the ballroom, connects a living room, morning room, and entry hall. Further south is the front porch and driveway, which gives access to the east and west sides of the house.
• West of the front hall, another hall goes from the garden, where the doberman stands guard, to a corner. Accessible from this hall are the garage, Veronica's office and media room, and another closet.
• The corner continues west, and has another bathroom, linen closet, and a sitting room.
  

 

It took me a few sessions to map out the house, but Veronica got murdered each time, and could be found dead in her office, strangled with a costume lariat.

A general timeline of night events:

• 9:02 - Veronica, while drunkenly talking about her upcoming horse show, spills her drink on her gown, and throws the glass onto the floor.
• 9:09 - Cochrane emerges from the east bathroom and goes to the ballroom.
  
• 9:15 - Veronica can be found dead in her office by now. It isn't possible to reach the office any earlier; if you attempting to follow her closely, you will bump into Smythe and be delayed just long enough to miss her by a few minutes.
• 9:18 - Alicia arrives, late, rings the doorbell, and Smythe answers and takes her coat. Alicia goes to the ballroom. 
• 9:21-9:23 - Linda and the werewolf leave the sitting room for the ballroom, stopping at the sun room on the way.
  
• 9:22 - Cochrane leaves the ballroom for the east bathroom again, and returns.
• 9:30 - Alicia and Michael dance together.
• 9:31-9:49 - Smythe sweeps up Veronica's broken glass and dumps it in the kitchen trash.
  
• 9:32 - Senator Asher, in the media room, leaves for the living room.
  
• 9:45 - Colonel Marston, in the living room, leaves for the ballroom.
• 9:47 - Asher leaves for the sitting room.
  
• 9:49 - Band breaks.
• 9:52-9:54 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael argue about horse sales at the bar.
• 10:00 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael leave the ballroom for the office.
  
• 10:08 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael arrive at the office and discover Veronica's body. Michael calls the police, with Cochrane's reluctant agreement.
  
• 10:09 - Band returns from break. 
• 10:10-10:16 - Michael leaves the office and goes to the garage, taking a roundabout route, and gets huffy if followed. He returns to the ballroom after this.
• 10:14-10:16 - Marston and Cochrane leave the office for the ballroom.
  
• 10:21-10:31 - Marston tells us (if we were not present), Smythe, and Alicia, who responds with horror and elation, in that order, that Veronica was strangled and her office ransacked. Ostmann either hears this from Marston or Alicia.
• 10:31-10:44 - A police car approaches and the doorbell rings. Smythe answers, and takes the detective, accompanied by Sgt. Duffy, to the office, where they examine the scene.
  
• 10:44 - Michael goes back to the garage, and once again gets angry if followed, and returns to the ballroom afterward.
• 10:45 - Marston leaves the ballroom for the library.
  
• 10:48-10:50 - Ostmann and Cochrane argue.
• 10:50 - Band breaks.
• 10:52 - Michael, if he wasn't followed to the garage, meets Marston in the library and kicks you out if you are there so they can discusss something in private. They both leave soon after and go to the ballroom.
  
• 10:52-10:58 - Marston goes to the fireplace and surrepticiously yet obviously burns something.
• 11:09 - Band returns from break.
• 11:19 - Michael goes to the garage for a third time.
• 11:21 - An ambulance arrives and removes Veronica's body. The detective and Duffy leave and wander the house.
  
• 11:40 - Detained by Sgt. Duffy and arrested.
  

In the epilogue, you are acquitted by a hung jury, even though your lariat was the murder weapon and a bullet from your costume was found by the body. The detective and Duffy consequently solve the case, but you're encouraged to try again.

 

The first immediately suspicious thing is that Senator Asher is found in the media room, adjacent to Veronica's office minutes after her death. That he wears a clown suit and watches CNN is suspicious too, but doesn't really link him to the murder.

In Veronica's office, everything's been opened and spilled all over the room, except for one mysteriously pristine manila envelope inside her desk containing an unsigned purchase and sale agreement for Ashcroft Farm, to Ostmann Properties. Cochrane's business card with the threatening note is found in the trash. Veronica's body, when moved, reveals a bullet, and at this point, counting the bullets in your own costume shows one is missing. You can't count them at any time before this - I tried.

Michael's business in the garage is obviously something you need to observe, and by hiding behind one of the cars, I could observe him popping the BMW's trunk. After he left, I opened it with a crowbar found here, and discovered a stack of financial papers, including an accountant's letter suggesting that Ashcroft trustee Colonel Marston had been investing the family fortune into Southeast Planning Corporation, his own private firm. One sheet at the back is torn off. I could not figure out how to interrogate Michael or Marston about this.

By hiding behind the library chair, you can listen to Michael and Marston's conversation. All that occurs is that Michael passes a piece of paper to Marston, which I assume to be the same as what he burns. It can be retrieved from the fireplace before it burns, and on it, lists both men as equal investors in Southeast Planning Corporation.

By interrogating the various characters, I learned a bit more about who everyone was, and their interpersonal relations.

• Michael, Veronica's husband, is new money, and liked by most but not all of the guests.
  
• Samuel Ostmann is Cochrane's mutually hated business rival in real estate and mostly constructs town houses and office buildings. He regards Veronica highly and Michael as pathetic. Marston admires him but thinks he is out of place here.
• Jack Johnson was hired through a friend of Veronica's and wants to be a lawyer.
• Colonel Marston, manager of the Ashcroft trust, is thought to be fogyish and paternalistic by multiple guests. He considers Michael to be easier to work with than Veronica.
  
• Bill Cochrane, the main driving force in local surburban expansion, has been drinking heavily. Michael calls him a crook, and Ostmann concurs. He is evidently frustrated that Veronica won't sell out to him, but thinks Michael might.
• Smythe has worked for the family since Veronica's parents generation. He can't be spoken to.
  
• The werewolf is Richard, Veronica's brother. Michael dislikes him, Ostmann calls him a parasite, and Marston calls him a manchild. Cochrane, Alicia, and Asher think him a pitiable wimp. He won't speak to you apart from growls until the murder is discovered, and admits he hates Veronica but would have killed her long ago if he could.
  
• Linda Meade, Richard's girlfriend, also isn't liked much by Michael or Marston, who think she is riff-raff that doesn't belong in the Ashcroft family, and she resents Veronica and Michael for how they treat her and Richard. She further accuses Marston of holding out on Richard's share of the inheritance.
  
• Alicia is a riding friend of Veronica and visits often. She thinks Veronica treats Michael poorly, and doesn't seem very approving of Richard dating Linda. Inviting a newspaper reporter to the party was her idea.
  
• Asher is a junior senator and is supported by Veronica and Michael, who hope he will be president one day. None of the guests have anything negative to say about him. Cochrane mentions that he used to date Veronica.

 

I'm calling it now - Alicia and Michael are having an affair. I won't yet go as far as to say one or both bumped Veronica out of the way and that Michael's clandestine business with Marston is for securing their future, or that Alicia got me invited as a patsy, but it wouldn't shock me if this weren't far from the truth.

As far as opportunity goes, Michael himself has an alibi - he is in the ballroom the entire time. So is Ostmann and Johnson. Smythe and Cochrane can also be seen prior to 9:15pm. This leaves Asher, Linda, Richard, and Alicia, though the question of how Alicia could have gotten out of the office unseen and to the circular driveway in only three minutes has no obvious answer. Her coat is soaking wet, and the rain slowed at 9:10, but that doesn't prove anything except that she had been outside somewhere before then.

As for means, whoever killed her was counting on Veronica being in the office at 9:15. My only explanation is that Veronica's spill was a ruse to leave the ballroom for the office for some reason, possibly having to do with the P&S, and the murderer or a confederate knew this would happen. The murderer also either stole or relied on someone stealing my lariat and bullet, but that could have been anyone, having presumably happened some time before the game began at 9:00.

So far I'm enjoying this, though I can't help but get the sense I've already done most of what there is to do, and solving the game is just a matter of stumbling onto the right bit of evidence and/or finding a way to communicate my findings to the detective. This hasn't been a problem yet, but please, no hints or spoilers, at least not any that aren't ROT13 protected, until I've beaten this game. My next plan is to search the rooms more carefully, and also try showing the evidence to everyone, including the detective, to see what their reactions are.

My Trizbort map (so far):