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Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is a detective adventure game based on the Qing dynasty era “Judge Dee” series of Gong’an historical detective stories, which were themselves loosely based on the historical Di Renjie, a Tang dynasty official who served as chancellor to Empress regnant Wu Zetian, and was renown for his honesty and being instrumental in restoring the Tang.

The Silk Rose Murders is Nupixo Games debut “feature length” adventure, having previously developed web games, and this was funded through a kickstarter campaign. As such, and also considering its unique setting, I am not inclined to be too critical of their first and hopefully not their last adventure, since it’s pretty decent, all things considered. But it would be remiss of me not to mention why I was somewhat disappointed by it.

As one can expect, being twice removed from the historical figure, Nupixo takes considerable liberties with the source material. Nupixo’s Di is a junior scholar-official newly appointed by the Gaozong court as a county magistrate, when he is in the right place at the right time to solve the murder case of an ambassador taking place within his jurisdiction. After Gaozong’s death and the political transition, Di is recalled to the capital by Wu to take on what seems like an unrelated murder, which spirals into a murder spree. The player, as Di, looks for clues, talks to witnesses, and does stereotypical adventure game things like going around to different places, using inventory items and solving puzzles. Classic adventure game stuff like saving cats that have climbed up high places and soothing the woes of random strangers, even if it’s not quite within the scope of a government official’s job description, in the process of hunting down the culprit.

Unfortunately, the scope of player involvement ends there. The original kickstarter pitch described a “deduction board” in which the player has to think about what has been learned from evidence and testimony and make inferences about what is going on, but this has been completely streamlined away. Now, said deductions simply appear, explaining to the player what Di has learned, without any need for the player to think at all, apart from noticing hotspots in the environment. (Thankfully, Nupixo did not streamline that away as well, unlike certain other recent adventure games.) This makes the game’s occasional quizzes about what is going on feel more like making sure the player has been reading the answer key than trying to solve the assignment on their own. It is as if the player is going through the motions of a detective purely mechanically without any of the corresponding cognitive aspects… which is most of the fun of playing a detective. What is a detective story without red herrings to ponder?

That is not to say that Silk Rose Murders isn’t a good adventure game. It’s just that it’s not really a detective adventure game. The puzzles in the game are somewhat abstract affairs, mainly in the way of pattern recognition and memorization. One of the patterns is even matching Chinese characters to their associated concepts and thus completely trivial to Chinese readers. Now, there is nothing wrong with a good abstract puzzle, and these have a long and storied tradition in adventure gaming history. But the puzzles here, apart from the cultural imagery employed, do not really connect to the context of the story. For example, one of the puzzles is a door with a combination lock, whose combination is a kind of math problem, but there is no characterization reason why its owner/creator would even set a math problem, and no thematic purpose served either by having Di solve a math problem. As such, these feel more like puzzles that exist for the sake of having puzzles, which is rather inelegant from a ludonarrative perspective. Yet it didn’t have to be this way. Part of the plot concerns the nvshu women’s script. How cool would it have been for players to have to try their hand at deciphering that script a la Heaven’s Vault? Or take the converse approach. How cool would it have been to not just have puzzles with Daoist imagery but also Daoist themes, where e.g. the logic of the five elements is elucidated by the characters and part of the solution?

The counterpart to contextually-relevant puzzles is a contextually-authentic setting to solve them in, and The Silk Rose Murders has similar issues here. Although I think it is unfair to be disappointed with low standards for authenticity by outsiders to the culture, their purpose in explicitly choosing this setting, Tang China, as opposed to any other setting, is surely because they care about its specifics and particulars. Even if it were cynically motivated about catering to the growing China market’s preferences, one would still expect a little better from Nupixo. Some errors can be blamed on their localization partner dropping the ball on basic things like consistency in romanization, consistency in simplified vs. traditional characters in the graphics, stuff that native speakers ought to have caught. But even if they did, there is only so much a third party can do about issues that are more fundamental in origin. The most visible example of what I mean is the title of the game itself. One could nitpick about whether the Chinese translated title should be using the term for rosa multiflora cathayensis or rosa sinensis, which is the variety of rose that is more similar to what is depicted in the game. Or one could ask whether roses even had the same kind of cultural significance in Tang China as it does in the West in the first place.

The Silk Rose Murders is full of anachronism. Anachronistic locations (Wu Zetian transferred the Tang capital to Luoyang), anachronistic plot elements, anachronistic designs, anachronistic characters. Of course, so were the gong’an detective stories it is based on, and China’s own historical fiction has plenty of anachronism, and for the most part Chinese people don’t seem to care too much about that either. But the anachronism here is especially jarring since Nupixo is trying to tell a particularly modern story with Western sensibilities, that doesn’t seem to have any real engagement with the setting. One of the cases in the game concerns an estranged father and daughter, in which the phrase ‘filial piety’ (the central Confucian virtue) does not appear even once, no exploration of the conflict of duties to one’s parent and one’s fatherland. Another core Confucian virtue is loyalty, and absent is any exploration of Di’s conflicts of duties between the sovereign and the state and its laws, or between the Confucian virtues of benevolence and righteousness, and pragmatic considerations of statecraft. The game wants to tell a tale of feminism and female empowerment that omits any mention of Princess Pingyang (sister to Tang Taizong, who was Wu Zetian’s first husband) without whom there might not have been a Tang dynasty in the first place. As such, it’s hard to feel like the characters in the game are from Tang and not Hongcouver.

If I had designed the Silk Rose Murders, it would have been the Winter Peony Murders instead. Di would have been solving a series of cult-related murders, where each case links back to Wu Zetian’s eschatological claim to be the incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha. This would provide a context for Di to solve Buddhist and Daoist themed puzzles as cryptic clues left by the culprit. Ritual sacrifice, tantric orgies, it would make for a great M-rated horror adventure. Call me, Red Candle Games!