The Mockingbird

The first in a planned series of detective games, The Mockingbird is a parser-based text adventure game inspired by closed-room murder mysteries à la Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

You play as a junior inspector of Her Immortal Majesty’s Cosmopolitan Police, called to the mansion of the reclusive artist Bregan Ennis to solve his murder. The game features multiple endings, reacting to the evidence you have been able to collect and the inferences you’ve been able to make from them. 

I’m planning on making at least three more of these – The Canary, The Peregrine, and The Albatross, but have been sadly delayed by other projects.

I was the sole designer, writer, and programmer. I built the game in Adventuron, an online tool for creating text-parser-based games. This was the first time I had used Adventuron and, while I haven’t gone back and used it again since, I have quite a bit of affection for it and the style of writing that parser games afford. Game design and planning (especially the flow of information, which is essential to the game) was done via a relationship matrix in Google Sheets. This game was produced as part of a class assignment for a course on Interactive Fiction at Concordia University and produced in the span of about a month.

Mechanically, The Mockingbird is Sherlock Holmes’s adage that “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Partially out of the hellish difficulty of writing effective deductive gameplay, I opted to instead make the Inspector the World’s Biggest Logical Positivist, figuring out who committed the game’s central murder through elimination rather than deduction, per se. This reduced the otherwise knotty leaps of logic a player might have to make to a set of manageable, adventure-game-y checkpoints for the player to clear in order to solve the case.

The game is available to play in-browser at my itch.io page.