Murder Cruise

Murder Cruise is a fun little murder mystery game that plays more like a game of Clue Master Detective than an interactive fiction title.

Your job as a detective is to arrest the killer on board the S. S. Hedonist as soon as possible by thoroughly exploring the ship, eliminating the innocents from the list of suspects, and finally accuse the murderer. Each turn, you choose what to do from a menu of choices, although strangely enough they exclude commands you would expect to find in this kind of games, such as TALK, EXAMINE, or INTERROGATE. Instead, you have to rely on room descriptions and characters' speech that show up when you enter each room, with no way of interacting with them.

For example, you might encounter the ship's captain in the kitchen who says "I saw the victim in the engine room shortly before he died," and it is up to you to note these clues. The whole game therefore feels like a longer version of deduction riddles, although that is not necessarily a bad thing because there is plenty of suspects to eliminate, and clues to follow. One fact given to you at the beginning of the game is that nobody knows who the murderer is, so you can always eliminate people whom other people accuse from the list of suspects. This is not very logical, and makes the game a bit easier than it could be.

Still, Murder Cruise is a fun time waster that should please anyone who enjoys solving riddles. Not a Top Dog, but well worth your sleuthing time.

Review By HOTUD