Parents' Guide to Murder by Choice: Clue Mystery

It's not always easy to cram the "interactive" part into an interactive story. Murder by Choice: Clue Mystery is a perfect example of this. The game has a cheesy but interesting story, as well as a collection of decent if not particularly challenging puzzles. But the two parts don't necessarily fit together in a way that makes any sense. You're often directed to find a key item to move the story forward. This usually leads to one of the game's many hidden picture puzzles, in which you have to find a list of items amongst piles of random bits and baubles. The key item is always somewhere on this list, which makes sense, but there's never any rationale behind why you also need to dig out the other junk. It makes you feel like you're pointlessly wasting time because nothing else you find makes any difference, yet you can't move forward until you find everything.

Those hidden item puzzles are also frustrating for another reason. Each one has very basic descriptions of the items you need to find, and it's difficult to make out exactly what many of the items are supposed to mb. For example, the game might ask for a pencil, only you to discover that it's not asking for a writing pencil, but for an eyeliner pencil buried in a makeup kit. On smaller phone screens, it can be hard to even make out what certain items are, much less if they're what you're looking for. Another frustration is that nearly everything you do in the game costs energy. When you run out of energy, you're stuck from progressing any further until you either wait for it to recharge at a snail's pace or you break down and spend money to buy energy just to keep the plot moving. Considering the story is already constantly interrupted by unrelated busy work, not being able to move past it because of you're low on some arbitrary action points does a better job of killing the motivation than the in-game murderer does to any of its victims.