When I first heard about
a game called The Elk Moon Murder I was intrigued and somewhat
baffled because the name made no sense to me. The game’s box offered
no explanation, just a hint: Elk Moon Murder is one of the
Santa Fe Mysteries games and Indians (or Native Americans to be politically
correct, although I find both terms equally semantically misleading)
play a prominent role here. The box also boasts the names of several
presumably well known names from the American TV industry (Shannon
Gilligan, Sam Egan, Amanda Donohoe) but I’m afraid the effect was
completely lost on me since I never really watched American TV.

The
name mystery was quickly explained as soon as I saw the opening sequence
of the game: a TV reporter tells us about the murder of Elk Moon,
Santa Fe’s prominent Native American artist. You play the role of
a Santa Fe Police Dept homicide squad investigator (I think) and you
are summoned to the Chief’s office. He explains that Elk Moon was
a well connected person and a strong pressure is being applied on
the Police Dept to solve the case very quickly. If the SFPD can’t
show results soon, FBI will take over – and the Chief won’t have that.
You are given five days to apprehend the murderer (or murderers).
As if one problem wasn’t enough, since Elk Moon was Indian, the case
needs to be handled with utmost care. Because you (as a white American
presumably) are not deemed capable of handling the investigation on
your own, you are assigned a Native American colleague, John Night
Sky (very poetic name) who should “do all the talking” – and he will.

You start the investigation
equipped with a PDA and a map. The map predictably allows you to move
around – but you can only visit a location after someone has told
you about it, hence there are not many places to go at the beginning
but quite a few near the end of the investigation. The PDA handles
communications with the Police HQ and forensic lab and also records
information about suspects, informants and clues. There is no inventory
in the game.

The first place to visit
is Elk Moon’s studio where she had been murdered (killed with one
shot to the head to be exact). You can discover some clues there and
then assign the forensic lab to analyze them. The trick is that the
analysis takes considerable time – which you do not have. Thus you
need to decide which objects are more likely to provide some leads
and concentrate on those.

The next activity is interrogation
of Elk Moon’s husband – the first of many (interrogations, not husbands
that is – the husband is Elk Moon’s second in fact). Your buddy Night
Sky does the talking (your character in fact never says a word in
the entire game) but you decide what he should ask about. Again, asking
each question takes some time (15 minutes of game time which seems
ridiculous) so you should only pick the questions promising to uncover
some clues and point to the suspects.

And there will be suspects
galore. You will soon discover that Elk Moon led a colorful life and
managed to make a number of enemies. More than that, at the time of
her death she was restoring an extremely valuable piece of Indian
art, and ancient pot – which is now (not too surprisingly) missing.
And very conveniently, there is a number of people around who wanted
to get their hands on this pot and might even kill for it. And as
if that weren’t enough, there are ex-husbands, ex-wives and ex-employees
who for one reason or other might have wanted to murder Elk Moon.
After you talk to each of the suspects, you can have a colleague at
the Police HQ check their alibi. The trouble is that almost nobody
has one. Yet again, checking an alibi takes a while so you have to
pick your suspects carefully.

When
the five days are up, you have to arrest the suspect you think is
most likely of having committed the crime. And this is where I had
a big problem with this game. I ended up with nearly 10 suspects of
which none had an alibi, each had a motive and the clues were pointing
in no particular direction. So I chose trial and error approach –
that rarely fails (it sure didn’t in this case).

But before I nailed the
right culprit I had my frustration level raised pretty high. It is
possible to get an arrest warrant for any of the suspects without
alibi (ie. nearly everyone in the game) after you select the correct
relationship to the victim and the suspected motive, which is not
too difficult. With the warrant in hand you can pay a visit to the
suspect. Only in some cases the Chief will intercept you and tell
you what an idiot you are since this or that guy has a bulletproof
alibi. Which is rather strange since your fellow investigators told
you that he or she had no alibi whatsoever – and why the heck didn’t
the Chief tell you if he knew better? With other suspects you
can actually attempt to apprehend them. Only they will shoot you or
beat you to death with blunt instruments. Which is again totally ridiculous
since you are armed (I hope!) and not alone.

But the list of suspects
is not endless and eventually I did find the right one. Apprehending
the suspect was not entirely easy and a little chase was involved.
But in the end the mystery was solved and the Chief was happy, probably
more than me.

But enough ranting, let’s
take a look at the technical side of The Elk Moon Murder. The
game comes on two CDs and a moderate amount of disc swapping is involved.
The game runs on DOS, Win9x as well as the Macintosh. From the above
paragraphs it is probably clear that it is more of an “interactive
movie” than an adventure game (which I do not consider a problem by
itself). Hence there is a lot of FMV sequences in the game.

The
game runs in 640×480 resolution and the movie clips are interlaced
(every other line is black) as is typical for many mid-1990s games
(it looks better than it sounds). The video quality is not great but
quite tolerable. I am bad at judging the quality of acting but it
was certainly good enough to convince me that practically every character
in the game was a suspect. The quality of the sound recording is quite
good.

There are no puzzles in
The Elk Moon Murder – the entire game is just one long puzzle.
Consequently it doesn’t take very long to finish the game, it took
me just one evening – and that included seeing almost every possible
bad ending (and the one good ending).

Before concluding the review
I should mention that as usual, the RSAC Advisory label on the box
did not fail to amuse me (in this case it was certainly funnier than
the game itself). If a mild game like this rates 3 out of 4 on the
violence scale, how much do games like Soldier of Fortune rate?
8 out of 4? Similarly, rating The Elk Moon Murder 2 out of
4 for both Nudity/Sex and Language seems a little too strong to me.
Curiously enough, the European rating (ELSPA) deems this game appropriate
for ages 11 and up, which is more in line with what I would expect.
Oh well, I suppose that just reveals that I’m a dirty European myself.

The Elk Moon Murder
is a race against time and nasty surprises set up to trip up unsuspecting
adventurers by the game’s creators. The game is technically very well
made but calling it an adventure game is probably not appropriate
due to the lack of puzzles. The game’s story is not uninteresting,
although it is perhaps a little too complex and it’s not easy to keep
track of who’s who, especially at the beginning. Thus my final grade
is a C+.

Final Grade: C+

System Requirements:

PC
486 DX2-66 MHz or higher,
Min 8MB memory,
DOS 6.0 or later,
Hard disk with 35Mb free space,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
16-bit High color SVGA video graphic card (VESA Local Bus or PCI recommended),
Microsoft mouse or 100% compatibles.
100% Sound Blaster 16-compatible sound card (for digital and general
MIDI audio)
Designed for DOS & Windows 95 operating systems.

Mac
68LC040 33/66 MHz
16 MB RAM
2X CD ROM drive
OS 7.5.1+