Genre: Puzzle
Publisher: EA
Players: 1
Retail Price: $3
Availability: iPhone
One day, before recording The Shenanicast, Dave told me that Clue was available on the iPhone. That seemed, frankly, like a horrible idea. Clue is a game played with other people, in the meatspace, and trying to shove a board game onto a phone to play against AI seemed, well, dumb.
Then he showed it to me, and it wasn’t Clue at all. It had the same characters (though any Plum not played by Christopher Lloyd is apocryphal to me), and many of the same weapons, but there was no board. You’re tasked with figuring out the killer, sure, but you don’t do it by talking to other players: you talk to the characters themselves.
This version of Clue is essentially a series of logic puzzles. You begin by questioning the suspects, who might drop a hint about an item (‘I hear Plum was reading a magazine’) which you then search for more clues. There’s generally some re-questioning involved, as one character will tell you about an altercation with another, and confronting the latter yields more information.
They conveniently always tell the truth
This part of the game is interesting enough, I suppose, but it eventually becomes mechanical: talk to the characters. Walk to different rooms. Search items. Talk to characters again. Search more items. I stopped paying attention to the clues as I got them, because they’re all recorded for you, browsable by the character they involve. The clues themselves are ridiculous if you think about them for more than half a second: how would Peacock know the murder weapon was a blunt object? Why does a scrap of paper in the fireplace say ‘the murder happened in the north wing’? The absurdity of them at times made me laugh, like when I had narrowed down the suspects to two and Colonel Mustard gave me the clue that confirmed he did it. Good going, jackass.
The meat of the game lies in the end, when you’ve collected everything and are ready to figure out who’s going to jail. You’re a journalist, by the way, not a cop, so I’m not exactly sure why a paper is looking into the murder and not, oh I don’t know, the police. The endgame is logic, pure and simple. You have access to a map, onto which you can place the locations of characters and weapons as you deduce them, and also a list of people, places and weapons that you can check off as their innocence is determined. Some of this is easier than others: there’s bluntness like ‘Green was in the bedroom’ but also ‘White was on a computer’ and ‘White was in the east wing,’ which along with some other clues would point you to the precise room she was in (there being multiple computers in the house). If thinkin’ ain’t your thing, you probably won’t like this game.
The levels change if you replay them, so the multiple maps are really just indicators of difficulty, allowing you to choose more or less rooms, with slightly different (but irrelevant, gameplaywise) configurations. You’re awarded up to four stars, one each for correctly identifying the culprit, room and weapon and another for completing it within the specified time limit. That’s not real-world time, but instead is an internal clock that decreases as you perform actions (searching, walking and talking). There were a few that I scored lower on my first time through, mostly because I’d forget that I needed to search leafy plants or something similar, but now that I’ve perfected all the levels I don’t see why I’d play anything but the final, most difficult, one.
No, it was only one bullet for the chandelier
There are also some achievements, though their existence is hidden within the main menu. They have no bearing on the gameplay, but as I’m now a child of the 360 I had to obtain all of them, which included some negachievements like ‘get zero stars’ (harder than you’d think, or maybe I’m just psychic) and ‘run out of time.’ Minor, but if you’re not a fan you need never know they exist.
This version of Clue shares more with the old DOS game Sleuth than its board game namesake, which is why it’s worth picking up instead of avoiding like the plague. It takes the historical elements of the game and strips them down to their core, providing a Sherlock Holmes experience that was a surprisingly fun time waster. There’s some replayability in there if you’re interested, but even if you’d prefer to forget about it once you’ve had your fill there are enough missions to keep you busy for quite a few doctor’s office waits, which has become my standard unit of time. I believe there are other EA/Hasbro board games on the app store now that haven’t had this treatment, remaining true to their roots, and so I can’t feign interest in them, but this… this I like.
And because I don’t think I’ve shoehorned in enough quotes from a childhood favorite of mine: I had to stop her screaming!
