IF Comp 2018 Review: Erstwhile

tl;dr: Workmanlike but unsatisfying. Also, spoilers.

I was prepared to like Erstwhile a great deal more than I finally did. The premise is charming (a ghost investigates his own murder), and the initial scenes are well-written. But once the story moved on to the 'combining clues' section, I lost any interest in what happened to the characters.

Clues are combined to give access to additional scenes. This mechanic frustrates when, e.g. the two witnesses' testimonies contradict, but the game does not recognize their combination as valid. Some limits  are obviously necessary, but I felt that the allowed combinations were either staggeringly obvious or rested on accidental likeness. I did appreciate the "you've learned all you can" ability to put useless clues into a separate category.

The central murder is far less interesting than the peripheral action. You participate in an unfolding of knowledge about the other characters (your character was uninterested in their true selves in life (but also somehow a master at manipulating them?)), which comes to a hard stop each time you refuse to think any more about something. There's an implied backstory which seems like it should be accessible but isn't, and the effect is the same as looking over a fence into a garden you can't enter.

The authors' dislike of the main character (you!) is so obvious as to be off-putting. The idea, floated by a daffy witch towards the end of the game, that you were a werewolf, would actually make him more understandable. Instead, you begin sympathetically (hard not to feel bad for a guy murdered at a picnic), but are revealed to be a caricature of every controlling, oblivious self-declared authority figure. I suspect that the exposure of his nastiness was intentional, as paralleling the discovery of the others' secrets. This is doubtless cathartic to write if one is unfortunate enough to deal with such figures regularly; it does not make for an engaging read.

I may have missed endings on this one, having played through only once. The only stage I could see significant departure from the storyline being possible was the possession/confession, and I hadn't saved along the way and couldn't be bothered to run through again. I'd be glad to replay if I knew that I had missed a chance to get more backstory or have some of the implications of certain (uncombinable) clues confirmed, but as it is I'm done.