PERSPECTIVE
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
T here’s this strange skill you gather, reading videogame reviews – or at least I did, as a kid relying on magazines as my portal to all games beyond the annual Christmas and birthday purchases. You learn to internalise a game’s ruleset, as laid out by the writer, in order to run a kind of dodgy emulation in your head. Nowadays, though, with virtually any game available within minutes of reading about it, these aren’t muscles I need to stretch very often. So I’ve found another way of exercising them: detective novels.
Take Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, which opens with Ronald Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments Of Detective Fiction’, the rules of engagement between writer and reader, as established during the genre’s 1920s Golden Age. Example rule: ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’. A couple of pages later, Stevenson stresses that he wants to play fair with you, in a way that reflects the century that has passed since Knox. He identifies, upfront, every chapter in which a murder will occur; read on Kindle, these appear as hyperlinks leading you to the relevant page. It’s an astounding trick, but one that – for my money – Stevenson struggles to match through the rest of the book.
It was another writer, though, who got me thinking about this whole thing; one who, as it turns out, was similarly raised on videogame reviews. Stuart Turton’s 2018 debut, The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle, is both a detective and time-loop story, with an amnesiac protagonist who must repeat the same day eight times, jumping into a new body each morning but also within the grounds of the same mansion, as he tries to solve a murder that happens every evening, at the masquerade ball. For any of you currently reaching for Wikipedia: yes, The Sexy Brutale came out a year earlier, as the book was being finished. Seeing that game’s announcement, Turton told Eurogamer in 2019, “I absolutely shat myself”.
You learn to internalise a game’s ruleset, as laid out by the reviewer, to run a kind of dodgy emulation in your head
You have to wonder, then, how his digestive system took the Obra Dinn arriving into port – his next novel, 2020’s The Devil And The Dark Water, was another murder mystery with a supernatural bent that opens with a delicately rendered schematic of its setting, an East India trading ship. On receiving an advance copy of his latest, The Last Murder At The End Of The World, I couldn’t help but play the comparison game once more. The book is a science-fiction spin on the murder mystery, set on a postapocalyptic island, the 120 or so inhabitants of which are the world’s last living people.
Shades of Arkane Lyon’s Deathloop, perhaps, in the seemingly immort
