Murders at Tealwoods Manor

⠀

‎

This isn't a game, and while it looks like it's some kind of non-game e-book, that's not it either. This is an advertisement! "Murders at Tealwoods Manor" is a small, misleadingly published demo/chapter of a larger, worse e-book fan-fiction masquerading as a game (books aren't games, I'll say this as many times as I need to). This advert features garbage, low quality high school anime club dropout fan-fiction writing intended to bait people into paying for the rest of the fan-fiction. Now, there are minor gamelike elements in this advertisement for an e-book, but not much... this was essentially a dialogue heavy ripoff of Cluedo, with tiresome and badly done schlock murder-mystery writing that would almost make one watch Murder, She Wrote (in fact that's written far better than this is). So this works more like a CYOA as you choose which character and get passages of pre-written text fed to you with every click you make... and that still doesn't make this game. Nobody ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book and the put it down and said "Wow, what an amazing game I just played". Because books are not games. This was made using the Ren'Py kit, which lets people who aren't dev…

i just couldn't quite get into this game. Right off the bat it was confusing, as I believed I was playing the game, being asked to make a choice and it just turned out to be an instructional loading screen. Then the dialogue is rough. It's poorly written, seems choppy, unpolished, and doesn't move the story along very well. I feel more like I'm listening to random, disjointed conversations rather than playing a story game. And it winds up feeling rushed and like a chore to get through rather than a game to enjoy. I feel like with some heavy polishing and working, it could be fun and interesting. But right now, it's just not engaging.

This is not really a game. I don't mean that in the braindead "ViSuAl NoVeLs ArEn'T gAmEs" way, I mean it in the sense that it promises a certain degree of choice and gameplay and does not deliver it at all. You bet on who's going to survive the night, which is pure random guessing, and you choose a room to go to one single time, and then nothing's in your control at all until you have to guess the murderer. The writing is atrocious, the dialogue is not set up well to handle randomized character roles, and the entire thing feels disjointed. There's not much real sleuthing, guests just shout accusations at each other randomly and then you have to guess the culprit despite dismissing everything every other time as "just gossip that's not going to get us anywhere." There's no real story, no motive behind the murders, no actual substance. This game promises a lot and just delivers disappointment.

Abandoned and bad. Except the guy offering you to bet on who will die, there's not a single good (or finished, or working) thing.