(Warning: this article includes some spoilers.)
And finally there was Suspect. Dribbled out into Hitchhiker’s huge wake just as 1984 expired, David Lebling’s first exercise in ludic mystery and Infocom’s fifth title of 1984 still carries with it a certain inevitable air of the anticlimactic. But we always try to give every Infocom game its due around here, and Suspect will be no exception.
If you’ve played Deadline or The Witness, or even just read about them, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Suspect. Once again this is a game that you must not so much explore as dissect; must not work your way through linearly from introduction to climax but rather assault from every angle. You can expect to finish it successfully only after dozens of restarts, each of them a little fact-finding mission all its own. Then, when you’ve seen all the pieces, you can fit them together and plan your final mission, at the end of which you will hopefully walk away with a guilty verdict (on someone other than yourself, that is). That’s the ideal, anyway; more likely the first few times you try you’ll find you still don’t quite have enough evidence, and thus it’s back to restarting and looking for more.
Suspect completes a neat trilogy of mystery roles. In Deadline you played the detective investigating a murder; in The Witness a witness to a murder; and in Suspect, yes, the prime suspect in a murder. You play a newspaper reporter who’s invited by Veronica Ashcroft, a Maryland blue blood and old friend from university, to her annual Halloween bash. Soon after your arrival Veronica is found murdered in her office — offices are dangerous places in Infocom mysteries; that’s where the crime in all three of them takes place — with the lariat that goes with your cowboy costume wrapped around her neck. You have to find the real murderer before the detective that comes to investigate and his associate, your old friend Sergeant Duffy, arrest you for the crime.
While Suspect, like The Witness, hews very firmly to the sturdy template laid out by Deadline, it does reflect Infocom’s ever-growing sophistication. There are far more characters to interact with than in the earlier games, and far more to see and do. Indeed, the world of Suspect is in many ways the most complex Infocom had yet created. Every character in the game is constantly moving about the rather expansive grounds of Veronica’s estate, and they mostly react believably to events around them, whether said events are set off by you or someone else. Granted, it is kind of odd that no one seems to care all that much when they learn that Veronica’s just been murdered, to the extent that they just continue enjoying Veronica’s own party despite her unfortunate absence. Then again, exactly this sort of behavior is par for the course in many an Agatha Christie novel, so I suppose we can take it as in the spirit of the genre.
Dave Lebling is generally a deft, elegant writer. He doesn’t entirely let us down here, but he is somewhat hampered by the need to describe so many comings and goings. It can all begin to have something of a mechanistic feel, as if all these characters were models moving about the house on tracks.
>s
Long Hall South
This is almost the southern end of the long north-south hall. A large doorway opens into the southern end of the ballroom. Another door on the west is to a small closet.
Ostmann is off to the east.
Alicia heads off to the east.
Smythe heads off to the north.
>s
Long Hall Begins
Here the front hall and a long north-south hall fronting the ballroom intersect. Another hall starts south of here and goes east.
The Werewolf is to the west, heading toward the east.
Linda is to the west, heading toward the east.
Smythe is to the north, heading toward the south.
In his defense, Suspect is hardly alone among Infocom’s mysteries in having this wind-up-toy feel about it. The very depth of the simulation tends to cut against their literary sensibilities.
Still, Suspect also has room for whimsy. Lebling gifts us with more Easter eggs and in-jokes than any game this side of Sorcerer. Shout-outs for hardcore fans are everywhere. One of the party-goers is dressed as a “short, cuddly-looking robot”; another is a grue; moving a rug aside gets you “Under the rug you see a wooden trap door… No, sorry! That’s another story.” Indeed, the more superficial elements are some of the most entertaining. The game is a little time capsule of yuppie life in the early 1980s, from the BMW 320i in the garage to “Karma Chameleon” playing in the ballroom.
The charm extends to the feelies, the main exhibit of which is a little Miss Manners-style guidebook called Murder and Modern Manners. The humor therein bites a bit more sharply than was the norm for Infocom, with at least one paragraph that qualifies as genuine satire, on the subject of “Prison Projects”:
Poetry can be a wonderfully sensitive medium for expressing your remorse and anguish. The study of law will help you improve your oratory skills, a clear benefit when you make vehement pleas to the prison parole board. Writing books can also be quite rewarding: the first eight editions of this book were all highly successful and sold particularly well among guilt-ridden liberals. But perhaps the wisest choice is painting. Prisoners are perceived as having great depths of repressed artistic genius. There are literally thousands of deep-pocketed dilettantes who are willing to pay a fortune for prison art. Especially if the work is being done by prisoners with a background of violent crime.
Infocom and G/R Copy were able to enlist a name artist with a long history in high and commercial art, Alan E. Cober, to illustrate the box and the booklet in his distinctively spare, modern style. The economic woes that would beset the company very soon after Suspect would make such prestigious collaborators a thing of the past.
The actual mystery at the heart of it all is intriguing, if also damnably difficult to crack. Suspect is in fact the second very tough Infocom game in a row, following seven very solvable titles between Suspended and Hitchhiker’s. (Hitchhiker’s and Suspect together are almost enough to make me revise my premise that Infocom games trended generally easier as the company grew older.) When you put together the clues which are laced very subtly through the text and the storyworld to divine who’s responsible and how he, she, or they committed the crime, it’s a wonderful moment. Unfortunately, that’s just the first step. Actually proving what you know to the detective’s satisfaction is something else, a task made even more difficult by a lack of feedback; you never really know how close you actually are or which bits and pieces you’ve presented to the detective are actually important. It’s particularly difficult to figure out that you need to monitor one absolutely vital thing, the changes in the weather, and hard to know how to ply the detective with that information afterward. In spite of it all, I almost managed to solve the murder in my recent playthrough, aided no doubt by vague memories from years ago. I just neglected to do one key thing and therefore was short one key clue. I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.
The final solution to the case doesn’t hang together quite as tightly as I’d like it to, a problem Suspect oddly shares with both of the mysteries that preceded it. I kept trying to find a good reason for Alicia to help Michael murder his wife; as the game itself says if you attempt to arrest her alone, she didn’t have any motive. I naturally suspected an affair between Michael and Alicia, but could find no evidence of this beyond seeing them dancing together briefly in the ballroom. Just as happened with both Deadline and The Witness, I was rather shocked when I secured a conviction. I thought there must still be more to discover.
Suspect would turn out to mark the end of the line for Infocom’s original, hardcore take on the interactive mystery novel. While they would continue to dabble in mystery, the later games would play more like conventional adventure games. It’s hard to say why a form that caused such excitement back when Deadline first appeared should peter out so relatively quietly. Certainly it’s clear that a significant number of Infocom fans, both then and now, dislike the form of play of the early mysteries intensely, even if enough enjoyed the format — or just let brand loyalty overcome their misgivings — to generate for Suspect fairly typical sales numbers for its period, just shy of 50,000 copies. But there was also perhaps something else: a feeling that, having invented the format with Deadline, Infocom didn’t quite know how to advance it. For all its additional polish, there’s nothing really new that Suspect brings to the table. It would be unfair to say it feels stale precisely, but it shares enough with its predecessors that it can feel a bit anonymous in their company. Suspect is certainly the least loved and least remembered of the three today. Of course, Infocom might have tried to shake up the approach with a hypothetical next game instead of abandoning it; just having the victim not be a blue blood and not die in her office would make a good start. But being as they never did, we’re left with a trilogy of games almost unique in adventuring history, and one which even comes with an overarching thematic progression. The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that. Maybe by putting the whole format out of its misery, as they did.
An inevitable footnote to any discussion of Suspect must be the gala that Infocom held to promote it at the January 1985 CES. It was by far the largest party the company ever gave, yet another marker of the high-water point this period represents. They invited some 5000 people to the Hartland Mansion in Las Vegas, formerly one of Elvis Presley’s homes, for what must be the largest game of How to Host a Murder ever played. Customized letter openers, previously mailed to invitees, served for tickets as well as party favors; these are today one of the most cherished of all pieces of Infocom memorabilia. One of these also became the murder weapon, in a crime staged by an acting troupe in front of the crowds gathered in the mansion’s ballroom around a huge indoor pool. The next day’s Las Vegas Sun bore the headline “Murder Rocks CES!,” with the important detail that it was all just pretend hidden below the fold. It seemed like great publicity — until it prompted authorities to investigate, whereupon they determined that the house had not been zoned for hosting a public event of such a magnitude. Infocom was forced to return to Las Vegas to testify in court, but thankfully the owners of the house bore the brunt of the pain. Not as sexy as murder, perhaps, but such is life in the real world.
(As usual at this time of year, The Digital Antiquarian will be taking a little hiatus while my wife and I travel back to the good old U.S.A. for Thanksgiving with my friends and family. Will be back at it in two to three weeks, at which time we’ll shift back over to Britain to look at 1984 there. I’ll see you guys then.)
David Boddie
November 22, 2013 at 8:51 pm
I’m sure I’ve already mentioned a game with a similar mechanic to this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_%28interactive_fiction%29
And it seems that the final role (protagonist as victim) was done five years later by Level 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapeghost
Jimmy Maher
November 23, 2013 at 8:02 am
I played Corruption years ago. I remember it as being all but impossibly hard to solve. Will revisit it again of course when we get there. And I’m very much looking forward to Scapeghost, which I’ve never played.
Robb Sherwin
November 22, 2013 at 8:56 pm
The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that.
Level 9 did with Scapeghost. :)
Great article, as always. Suspect’s manual is my absolute favorite of any game, ever. I had always wished that Infocom did a game about Dr. Charles Edwards, Emergency Room Surgeon / Murderer.
matt w
November 23, 2013 at 12:30 am
There’s also the old “Someone has slipped you poison and you have 24 hours to solve the mystery and maybe get the antidote” wheeze. (Looks like this is in the 1950 movie D.O.A., probably among others.) Goes nicely with a turn limit.
Anon
November 23, 2013 at 4:54 am
Or alternatively, the player could have been the murderer, who now has to destroy, conceal, and alter evidence, and eliminate, turn, or trick witnesses, so as to not be discovered by the investigator.
Jimmy Maher
November 23, 2013 at 8:05 am
I think I might recall a recent game that worked something like that… :)
Mark Ricard
January 14, 2014 at 4:04 am
I even remember somebody review of that game in SPAG Magazine issue 61.
Mark Ricard
January 14, 2014 at 6:12 pm
*someones review.
Peter Piers
October 16, 2015 at 7:21 pm
Erm… any chance the comment above could be deleted or edited? I’m sorry, but it’s a huge, unprompted spoiler. I happened to play that game, and the realization that we’re talking about here was *crucial* for my enjoyment.
(I then proceeded not continue, because that level of complexity does not suit my tastes at all. But ah well)
Jimmy Maher
October 17, 2015 at 9:30 am
Edited the comment so you’ll have to go looking for it to find out what game it is.
Marshal Tenner Winter
November 22, 2013 at 9:34 pm
Hi! You stated ” I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.”
My 2 cents on this is that you “examine” with your eyes only and “search” with your eyes and hands. This is how I implement it in my games, but I’ve been told to warn my players about it.
Jimmy Maher
November 23, 2013 at 8:04 am
That’s not how Lebling sees it. :) I think that SEARCH and LOOK IN are pretty much equivalent in most of the Infocom games, this one included. And indeed, the clue is found on the inside of the mask. Still strikes me as needlessly cruel, verging on guess the verb.
Mark Ricard
January 6, 2014 at 9:10 pm
Jim,I had the same problem about a year and half ago when I first played Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin. At one point you can only find the object with search instead of examine. It is too bad because that was the only time I needed look at the walkthrough in the entire game. He claims it was a mistake on his part.
Zurlocker
November 23, 2013 at 7:22 am
Good write up. Personally, I thought the artwork for Suspect was among the ugliest they ever used. But glad to know that it was “art”. :-)
Giuseppe
November 26, 2013 at 3:05 pm
Yeah, I’m glad to know that it’s ‘art’ too, seeing how I think it’s hideous.
Torbjörn Andersson
December 1, 2013 at 10:17 pm
There was a different cover illustration for Suspect in one of the Infocom product catalogs. You can see a scan of it at http://gallery.guetech.org/incomplete/incomplete-4.jpg though it’s a bit fuzzy since even the original image was pretty small.
Felix
November 23, 2013 at 11:33 am
Amazing how much Karma Chameleon has been used as a symbol for 1983-1984. I remember an issue of the New Teen Titans where the eponymous protagonists are walking down the street and the same song is blaring from somebody’s boombox. I can’t think of any cultural product that would define 2013 to the same extent AND be remembered three decades from now. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be…
Rick Reynolds
January 9, 2014 at 1:09 am
I’m sorry to post so late, but I was going through my Infocom collection of stuff and found a Quitclaim deed that I believe matches info from this game.
It isn’t listed anywhere on the Infocom fact sheet. Was it an extra feelie distributed with the Invisiclue booklet for this game?
Jimmy Maher
January 9, 2014 at 10:19 am
It doesn’t ring any bells with me. If you were to scan it and post it somewhere, maybe somebody might be able to help.
Dave Thompsen
March 5, 2014 at 4:18 pm
The “Quitclaim Deed” is the map packaged with the Suspect Invisiclues sold separately from the game.
http://gallery.guetech.org/suspect_invisiclues/suspect_invisiclues.html
Peter Piers
October 16, 2015 at 7:33 pm
How bizarre – it looks exactly like the sort of feelie Infocom would have been glad to add in the box! I wonder why they “relegated” it to the InvisiClues packaging… Did InvisiClues often have that much extra stuff?
Jimmy Maher
October 17, 2015 at 9:33 am
Not usually, no. Normally just the hints and a standard boxes-and-lines map of the game. It’s very possible that map was originally made for the game, but then it was decided it was too expensive to include and/or made the game too easy, so it was relegated to the hint booklet. That would be my best guess anyway.
Peter Ferrie
December 8, 2015 at 12:20 am
And no mention of the bug with the magically appearing body? If you take the shortcut between the halls, you can reach the office one move before the body is placed.
Vince
August 20, 2024 at 5:24 pm
Indeed. By cutting through the library you can get to the office in 13 moves, and the body magically spawn at 9:14.
I though it was a pretty big oversight.
Joe Pranevich
July 24, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Having just played through this, I had the same problem with not knowing to ask about the weather and completely misreading the clues that I had. I assumed the hair was from a struggle rather than part of the disguise.
I had built an overly-complex schedule so that I could zoom around from place to place and witness all the conversations, Michael and Alicia dancing, etc. I thought that I needed to do it all in one playthrough to get the best ending.
This one was fun and I place it above “The Witness” personally, although in part because I solved that one by accident. It’s a shame they didn’t make any more because the format seems to have so much promise.
RurouniJames
April 15, 2020 at 4:56 am
This is probably a late reply but I’m curious as to whether or not all of the events/code of Suspect has ever been put out there for public viewing.
I used to play this game a ton when I was a kid. My grandmother has a C64 and it was tradition that every time I visited her house that we’d spend several hours of each night I was there trying to solve it. I think we got close at one point but it was just too much for us. So instead of trying to solve the murder we just started doing all sorts of random things. Highlights include dragging the body throughout the house to show it off (I’m sure almost everyone has tried this though) and watching a literal fight break out on the dance floor between two of the characters (I can’t remember which two). Try as we might, we could never get the fight sequence to happen ever again so for a lot of time I thought maybe I had imagined it. But my grandma still remembers it happening so it’s unlikely that we both just imagined it happening.
I’m curious as to what other weird things could happen in the game, hence my question about whether or not the events from the code were ever posted. Would love to read through it if so.
Jimmy Maher
April 15, 2020 at 7:09 am
You’re in luck. The indefatigable Jason Scott put all of the original ZIL source code for the Infocom games on GitHub about a year ago. Suspect is here: https://github.com/historicalsource/suspect.
RurouniJames
April 21, 2020 at 5:39 am
That is awesome. Thanks for the link.
Peter Orvetti
June 20, 2020 at 6:12 pm
I’ve been puzzling over this one for a while: What is the colorful blob above the Wolfman’s head on the far left side of the cover art intended to be? It does not look like a costume…
Lisa H.
June 20, 2020 at 7:21 pm
I think it’s the helmet of a spacesuit.
Peter Orvetti
June 20, 2020 at 8:50 pm
Ah! Indeed it is. Thanks!
Lisa H.
February 24, 2021 at 9:33 am
The spoiler text isn’t working on Safari (at least on iPadOS) – highlighting the text does nothing and it’s still illegible black on black.
Jeff Nyman
October 9, 2021 at 1:03 pm
“It’s hard to say why a form that caused such excitement back when Deadline first appeared should peter out so relatively quietly.”
I think you answer that in this very post with the following points:
* “The final solution to the case doesn’t hang together quite as tightly as I’d like it to.”
* “It can all begin to have something of a mechanistic feel, as if all these characters were models moving about the house on tracks.”
* “Having invented the format with Deadline, Infocom didn’t quite know how to advance it.”
Exactly!
The format was just never made very interesting in a text-based format. Graphical-based mystery games tended to add quite a bit more to the proceedings. I think the “text adventure mystery format” serves as a good example of why text adventures were so limited when used in the context of trying to tell an actually interesting story and while also having various game mechanics at play to facilitate a “mystery” that you had to piece together.
Three of the games in Infocom’s canon — the mystery games — while being interesting for what they tried to do are more emblematic of simply being not all that great — but perhaps the best that there was at the time. I feel like this can be said about much of Infocom’s canon, unfortunately, especially when looked at from the vantage point of when more gaming options were available.
Vince
August 20, 2024 at 5:51 pm
I was able to finish all three Infocom mysteries without hints and for me Suspect was not as hard as Deadline and not (nowhere near) as easy as The Witness (spoilers ahead).
I believe it is made easier than Deadline by the small numbers of interactable objects in the game; I was stuck at the mask for some time, but since there are really not other relevant objects related to the murder that can be interacted with, it becomes clear that the mask must have some importance.
Telling the detective about the rain is probably the biggest leap of logic but, once again, when you realize that how the wet overcoat is related to the murder, it is fairly easy to get there.
About Alicia’s motive, you are given a pretty big hint if you ask her about Michael after the murder when he’s not around: “Now he’s free of that creature! It serves her right.” Geez Alicia, tell me how you REALLY feel…
I liked the murder plot the best out of the three, but overall it feels as your actions have less impact than in Deadline. There is a real feel of danger in Deadline from how a second murder happens before your eyes and you can actually get killed yourself. Here the characters go through their motions without you being able to influence the course of events.
There is supposed to be a bad ending if you manage to alert both Michael and Alicia and they escape, but by that time you have enough evidence to secure a conviction so I’m not sure how many players ever saw that ending…
I’m sad to hear that this was the last game with this structure from Infocom. As artificial the process of solution is, it is very satisfying when all comes together.
Jimmy Maher
August 21, 2024 at 5:52 pm
Some games of the post-Infocom era have taken up the mantle. You might want to have a look sometime at Adam Cadre’s Varicella, which plays conceptually similar to the Infocom mysteries, but in a much richer, more fleshed out setting. Plus one twist: you play as the murderer engineering the perfect crime instead of a detective cracking the case. ;)