Saturday Morning Gaming: The Painscreek Killings

Before I can tell you about The Painscreek Killings, there’s some stuff I need to talk about first.

A million years ago, a little game called “Gone Home” came out (I talked about it here). As games go, it was more of an interactive story. You come home from college and walk up the stairs to the new (but familiar) house your family just moved into and help them unpack all of the stuff. But nobody’s there? Mom and Dad and sister are all missing? What the heck happened?

And so you walk around the house and you find diaries and notes and you can dig through opened mail and half-unpacked boxes and figure out what has been going on. It was like Bioshock without any fighting at all (the game’s creators met working on DLC for Bioshock 2). The game involved just walking around and finding the history of what happened in the house and learning where everybody was.

If the main thing you were looking for in a game was run and gun, you would have been sorely disappointed. If, instead, you played Bioshock thinking “Man, I’d have liked the game more if I could just walk around and skip the fights”, then this was a game for you. You didn’t have to worry about snooping through strangers’ things because, hey, this was your family. These were boxes that you’d be expected to rummage through anyway.

There may have been a feeling of existential dread as you walked around your house and learned what was going on, but, you know, it’s not like there was someone trying to kill you. You were just trying to figure out what happened and finding the various keys to get through the various locked doors that would let you find more keys that would open up more hallways with more doors that may or may not be locked.

So that’s part of the groundwork I need to do. Here’s some more:

In last week’s post about Cities: Skyline, I mentioned how Sim City 2000 became the standard of all sims for a while there. One of the sims that followed in Sim City 2000’s footsteps was a little game called “Afterlife“.

Afterlife came out in 1996. It was a sim where you ran both Heaven and Hell (and a handful of Purgatorial pubs and waystations). I happened to be smack dab in the middle of my senior year of college and found managing an afterlife to be downright soothing.

You needed places to put the souls who arrived from the planet, you needed angels and devils to be in charge of giving them their dessert, you needed schools to train the angels and devils, you needed topias for the angels and devils to live in so they didn’t need to commute, Karma stations to handle the souls that were going to end up being reincarnated, and ports to handle the crossing of the various rivers in heaven and hell.

You needed to manage the various “vibes” that each reward/punishment labored under (you want good vibes in heaven, bad vibes in hell) and you needed to handle finances.

And, of course, you had to manage the fate structures that operated as the different punishments for the Seven Deadly Sins, multiple rewards for the Seven Heavenly Virtues, and a handful of rewards that handled the generic. Punishments for Envy included “Out of the Frying Pan” where souls constantly wished they had it as good as the people in the fire (where they swapped to being souls that wished they had it as good as people in the pan while, in heaven, Kindness rewards included neighborhoods where YOUR grass was always greenest. And so on down the line for Wrath vs. Patience, Temperance vs. Gluttony, Sloth vs. Diligence, Pride vs. Humility, Lust vs. Chastity, and Greed vs. Charity. Ironic punishments abounded and they were balanced out above with not-always-ironic rewards.

Half the fun of the game was building a new structure once you had the vibes and the workforce figured out and then going and reading the text explaining the new reward/punishment.

One of the generic punishments was called “Riddle Me This”. Here’s the description:

Almost everyone likes a good puzzle once in a while (and thank goodness they do, or I’d be out of a job!). But try to imagine how much life would suck if EVERYTHING were a puzzle. Picture a world where every door needs a key, and every key requires an answer to a riddle which can only be found by going on a quest to retrieve an object which is hidden in a silver box which is… well, you get the picture.
(Author’s note: This vision of Hell should not be seen as a representation of LucasArts’ many fine adventure games, such as “Sam & Max Hit the Road,” “The Dig,” “Full Throttle,” etc. Many of these games are very much the anitithesis of a Hell-like experience, and should be regarded as the exception that proves the rule.)

Well, that brings me to The Painscreek Killings.

Painscreek Killings is a walking simulator (well, running simulator) where you are a journalist who is investigating the murder of a resident of Painscreek a few years prior. It is the late-ish 90’s and you’re investigating the murder of Vivian Roberts, a woman who was killed back in 1995. You walk around the abandoned town of Painscreek and you discover diaries and keys and notes and answering machine messages and through these things you piece together not only what happened in 1995, but the stories that happened that set these stories in motion.

The very first place you visit is the Sheriff’s office in front of the locked gate to the town. You go into the abandoned office and find some notes, a key to the gate, and a flashlight. You also find a locked file cabinet that has “CLASSIFIED” written on the drawer. The file cabinet needs a number combo to unlock it… well, check the drawers. Check the wall. Maybe the combo is behind a painting on the wall? Okay, none of the paintings in the Sheriff’s office are clickable… Oooh, there’s a corkboard on the wall. Maybe the combo is on there. There’s a flyer with phone numbers! There’s a flyer with a date! Okay… those didn’t work… take a picture. Come back to this.

Okay, I’ll come back to this later, I guess.

And so you use the key you find to unlock the gate and now you can walk around the little village of Painscreek. A whole bunch of houses, an inn, a farmer’s market, a church, a hospital, a mansion, a cemetery, and all sorts of things to wander around and see at leisure. Take a picture.

It’s a weird kind of abandoned, though. It’s like everybody up and left in a hurry. It’s 1995, right? Well, there are things left behind everywhere. Not just trash next to the trash bins, but expensive things like fax machines. Personal artifacts. Pictures of people. Bottles of wine. *CASES* of wine. Cigars. Sets of books. Take a picture.

With everything still there, it doesn’t feel like the town was abandoned. It feels like everyone was instead spirited away.

You know the phenomenon of “I told you that story so I could tell you this one”? Well, this little village has plenty of stories and plenty of secrets and the stories are Rashomon stories. You read this lady’s diary and you get her perspective and then you read the diary of the priest and see that he had a piece of information that the lady didn’t have… and then you read this young man’s take on the story and get a third perspective that fills in a bunch of holes.

And next to the diary is a key. And the key opens another door, another lockbox, another desk drawer. You find more notes. You find more diaries. You find more keys. You get more pieces of information and more combinations to more locked obstacles. Take a picture.

And you’re going to be running around a *LOT*. You’re going to learn something in the church that will help you unlock something in the mansion. You’re going to learn something in the mansion that will help you unlock something in the hospital. You’re going to find a key in the hospital that will be useful in the inn. The inn will have something that you’ll need for the mansion. And then back to the church. And then back to the hospital.

AND HOLY CRAP THERE ARE SO VERY MANY LOCKED THINGS IN THIS GAME. Seriously, I had to use a walkthrough.

Several times I went through a newly unlocked room and was pleased to have found 3 things and then, glancing at the walkthrough, I see that there was a fourth thing that I missed. A card on a chair. I only went through the drawers on the nightstand on the right, I overlooked the drawers on the nightstand on the left. That sort of thing.

And I had a half dozen keys, none of which I could use yet, because I needed to get another key that would let me into the former house of one of the characters that had a locked closet that one of the keys went to. But in the closet was another diary that gave another hint as to the spiderweb relationships of the people in the town. Who was Vivian Roberts? Who was her husband? Who was the prime suspect? Who was in love with whom? Whose love was unrequited by whom? What did the household help know? What did the priest know? What happened in the 1970’s?

And, at the end of the game, it asks you “Who killed Vivian Roberts?” and it asks you “What was the Murder Weapon?”

And it asks you which of your pictures was the most appropriate for the front page story you’ve finally broken after all of these years.

What’s absolutely crazy is that I don’t know whether or not I can recommend the game. It delves into some seriously dark places as you’re investigating why the name of the game is plural rather than singular and so it’s not a game that I can recommend to fans of walking simulators necessarily, the puzzles are B.S. because you’re not going to beat the game without a walkthrough and so I can’t really recommend it to people who want a somewhat interactive murder mystery because you are going to miss this item in this overlooked desk drawer or that card on that similarly-hued chair or you’re going to get a code for something and you’re going to mess up the numbers because you’re putting the code for this door into that door (or vice versa) and it’s almost exactly like the Punishment “Riddle Me This” mentioned above.

I mean, remember that file cabinet I mentioned in the Sheriff’s office? Yeah, that’s one of the last things you open in the game. (I, personally, found that somewhat irritating.)

On top of that, there are some serious spoiler things that I’d want to say “I need to warn you that this game has serious spoiler things” but, you know, *I* played and beat the game without encountering those things and some of the big reveals in the game were an absolute *DELIGHT*. But other reveals in the game were thematically dissonant to the point where I don’t know whether I can recommend the game. And I don’t want to say more than that because of spoilers. It’s like I want other people to play it so I can talk with them about how much I hated this part and how much I hated that part and, seriously, this other part was *NUTS* (in the bad way). But, like, not to the point where I can feel like I can tell anybody to spend $20 on it.

It’s too heavy for the people who want a light game and too light for the people who want a heavy game.

So I’ll just say this: The Painscreek Killings is like reading a really satisfying murder mystery. There are multiple clues, multiple rabbit holes, and a lot of things that come into conflict with other things and those other things are only resolved once you find another diary giving another perspective on the chaos and it’s that additional perspective that has you *FINALLY* understand what happened and why. It’s neither heavy nor light but *CHEWY*.

And here’s the crazy thing, I can imagine someone playing this and then beating it and getting upset that I recommended it to them. Even as I beat it and said “Holy cow, that was an amazing game and I wish I could talk about it more without making it something that someone else doesn’t need to play.”

If you liked Gone Home but wish that you were investigating something with much higher stakes, check out Painscreek Killings. If you played Gone Home and felt ripped off by the fact that it was a walking simulator, well, this game doesn’t take place in a sprawling house. It takes place in a dang village. And you’re going to be running *ALL* over. You’re going to wish that the game had a teleport. You’re definitely going to wish that you could run faster. So, like, stay away. Everything that you hated about Gone Home will be turned up to 11.

But if you don’t mind walking around a lovely village that hides some ghastly secrets, this game might surprise the heck out of you. Goodness knows, it surprised the heck out of me.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the little church from The Painscreek Killings. All screenshots taken by the author.)