Happyland

Happyland is a Deadline-style murder mystery set in a combination hotel and theme park. It needs some polish, but overall it’s a really good IF mystery.

Happyland‘s greatest strength is the degree to which it simulates the feel of an investigation. Not only can you use a magnifying glass to investigate objects carefully, you can take fingerprints and do forensic analysis — and you actually get detailed reports on these, with whirl, loop, and arch information on fingerprints and chemical composition on substances like blood! You don’t need to know what everything in a report means, though, since you’re mostly matching the reports against each other, but the level of detail adds to the sense of immersion. The clues are also laid out well, so that if you’re investigating carefully one lead guides you logically to the next. There’s a lot to find, too, as the situation surrounding the murder is more complicated than it first appears. However, you don’t actually have to uncover all the evidence to get a good ending. Instead, as long as you find enough evidence the guilty will be convicted and sent to prison, with the length of the prison sentence effectively serving as a measure of the quality of your investigation.

Like Deadline, Happyland keeps track of time, with specific events happening at specific times. So, for example, if you decide in the afternoon that you want to examine the body further you’re too late: The coroner will have taken it away by then. Happyland is much more forgiving than Deadline, though: You’re told near the beginning when major events will occur, and most of the important pieces of information required to solve the murder aren’t on timers. Still, you may find yourself needing to restore to an earlier save (or even restarting) to complete the investigation.

Speaking of which, there’s only one save game slot. I would really have liked more, especially because of the timed events. Some objects mentioned in the game that you think should be implemented aren’t actually implemented. Plus there are some in-scope problems with objects: Sometimes disambiguation will reveal the existence of an object you haven’t found yet. In addition, in a few cases the game assumed that I had figured out something that I hadn’t actually yet. To be fair, though, in a mystery with several suspects who react differently to evidence depending on where you are in your investigation it can be quite difficult to have all the possible sets of who-knows-what-and-when nailed down just right. In fact, given how many characters there are in the game, I found fewer of those problems in Happyland than I might have expected.

Happyland also specifically acknowledges Deadline‘s influence: The author says he was porting Deadline from ZIL to Javascript earlier this year and decided to take a break to write his own Deadline-like mystery.

Overall, Happyland is a well-designed mystery that simulates an investigation better than most similar games I’ve played. It could use some more polish and more save game slots, but I had a lot of fun with it. In fact, I’d say Happyland is one of the better IF mysteries I’ve played.