Game Profile

Author Penny Wyatt Idiom English Authoring System Inform6 Release Year 2004 IFR Overall Rating

My first clue was a line in the banner: "(With apologies to all real-life characters and Government organisations upon which this is based!)" Do I detect a faint scent of "in-joke game"? Of course, the dead giveaway came when I encountered a character with the same name as the author. So assuming that "Penny Wyatt" isn't a pseudonym, or that it's the pseudonym of somebody who really does belong to an Australian aero club, I'm going to venture the hypothesis that this is one of those games where the author implements some familiar setting and characters, drapes a little concept around them, and then releases it to the world. It's a close cousin of the "implement your house" and "implement your job" games: the "implement your hangout" game. The vast majority of the time, games like this are vastly entertaining to the lucky few who are acquainted with the people and places represented, and irritatingly baffling to the rest of us. Murder At The Aero Club is no exception, though its competent prose and the presence of an actual story (albeit minimal) render it a cut above many. One of the problems with games like this is that they assume too much. Because the setting is so familiar to the author, a kind of unconscious shorthand sets in, a failure to fully describe the world. Perhaps it's difficult to take an authorial approach to things that are right next to you, especially if you're trying to fictionalize them just a little.

Car park
You are standing beside your car, parked in a small gravel parking
area. Light streams onto the ground in patches, mottled by the shade
of the gum trees high above. Surrounding you is an assortment of
vehicles. A gravel path leads north to the front door of the
clubhouse, while to the west stands a large maintenance workshop.

Here are the things I tried to examine: workshop, clubhouse, path, gravel, vehicles, trees, lot, and car. Here's what was implemented: vehicles and car. The rest told me "You can't see any such thing," which seems awfully contradictory to what's just been described to me. It's very difficult to get a great mental picture of my surroundings when they seem so hastily sketched. Still, vehicles and car are at least something. Here's what the game tells me about the vehicles:

The vehicles appear to belong to the various members of the flying
club. Among the ones you can see from your position are a gleaming
green Porsche, a dirty ute, a formidable-looking motorbike, and a
dust-covered van. Many of the vehicles have "I Love Aircraft Noise"
stickers attached to their windows. There's also your little car, of
course. It's looking a little worse for wear after the gruelling
eight-hour drive to get here.

You know what the game told me when I tried to examine the Porsche, the ute, the motorbike, and the van? Yeah, that's right. I couldn't see any such thing. The premise of the game is that you play a detective sent to investigate a murder at an amateur aviation club deep in the outback, but it's hard to feel like a detective when you can't even see huge objects all around you. Heck, I don't even know what a "ute" is (aside from an Indian tribe and a joke from MY COUSIN VINNY), and I would have really appreciated a little description, but it wasn't to be. See, for this game's real audience -- the people it depicts and the people who know them -- a description of those cars isn't necessary, because those people already know what the cars look like. The PC is an outsider to the situation, and the game's inattention to world-building certainly helped me identify with that excluded feeling, but I wasn't even able to do the basic sorts of examinations a detective would do, which in the end wasn't much fun, and didn't really make much sense.