YouTubers Try to Solve a Mystery | THE PAINSCREEK EXPERIMENT pt. 2

completely random but I was watching this on my switch and near the end it actually froze the entire console and none of the buttons or anything work anymore. amazing video and I'll watch the third part on my phone after commenting this but yknow. that's unfortunate for me

okay so I dont see anyone addressing your ending commentary about how to end a game early: I do agree the feature is half baked and part of the appeal that should have been there is the experience you gained during your investigation I think they were on the right track when your editor says "did you get all the facts" if they had elaborated on that feature it would have been a funny feature to some or a good milestone besides the common stats for completion (for example the completion stats are cool but evidently they didnt change if you the player made a guess regardless of context that was almost exactly correct) a way that this could be amazing if fleshed out is what I was saying earlier if the ending comments from the editor werent so.. sweeping? it would have made the feature funny or extremely valueable to the player for replayabilty one thing this game teaches you is even in a seemingly perfect town everyone is at fault "it takes a village" a phrase commonly used to explain how raising a child alone is hard and that it takes community to do.. what if that community are horrible people?? which is exactly what scott is faced with the story follows a woman who originally you believe can do no wrong soon we find out thats far from the truth imagine if we had a conviently placed system of speculation leading the player to replay and find everything but also give them a way to truly be the detective and guess off the rip with little to no justifiable proof it would be hilarious if the game encouraged you the player to make wild and unfounded guesses at random "i'm a genius" to some it would be exploitable but be honest when you want to cheat you will cheat anyways but for those of us who scream at movies or true crime shows it would amazing to be a tin hatter in 5 seconds of playthrough another way to add this without ending the game for these decisions would be a polling feature similar to the telltale walking dead where after each act or for this game after finding damning evidence you are asked who you currently think the killer is like in end game and at the true end the editor has a email detailing your investigation guessing right off the rip leads her to praise you well for being a good investigator and getting everything from this story on the flipside if you consistently guess wrong she grills you for not paying attention to key details and half assing the article

welp thats what I think atleast sorry this is so long 😅

I figured out the killer early, but I still think it is fun to dog through and get all the details. It is fun to be right as well as wrong

Im glad the one that sequence broke the biggest basically ended up knowing all the information that they would have gotten from the sequence breaks anyways

wrt sequence breaking and early endings: I'm not sure whether what the picture you submit is contributes to the ending you get, but it feels like it should. If the picture (a man in a hoodie) is unrelated to the article (Correct Suspect killed Vivian with Correct Weapon), that would be a reason to get that quizzical "are you sure you got your facts right?" response, as opposed to an article with an incorrect solution but a picture of the weapon, which could provoke a more personalized "how dare you publish this slander" response. That's probably a really complex system to add to the camera mechanics, but letting the player send a photo does invite that kind of wondering about what influences your ending.

wrt "cheesing": i think any attempt to implement real detective work into a video game context will be vulnerable to the kind of extra-narrative detective work Wren does with the locks, as the alternative would be, in that case, making every lock in the town lockable and unlockable so a player doesn't get too far ahead by knowing that particular doors will be important. I get thinking it's not good form for engaging with the narrative, but part of playing a point and click adventure game is figuring out which objects can be clicked in which ways and inferring the shape of the puzzle you're being presented with accordingly.

Jen is so fricking cool and based though, I get sparkly eyes now whenever she's on screen

I never thought I'd be gasping for breath in catharsis while Spongebob danced before my very eyes

What I've learned about video games is the best ways to hiding a secret in a game is giving the player 2 ways of interacting with the same object

Something my brother and I did that seemed to be throwing all of you off was that we took pictures of EVERYTHING. Multiple times if I hadn't said "Take a picture! Take a picture!" we would have completely forgotten it existed, and it helped when we were stuck. Instead of running around everywhere we would stop and look at what we'd taken pictures of and it would lead us to something we hadn't considered checking out.

Maybe the ghost doesn't appear after you've broken into the car? Idk even that feels dumb if intentional, I've gotta believe it's a bug

This game has a style very reminiscent of The Return of the Obra Dinn by Lukas Pope (a game which I'm fairly sure I've already recommended in another comment section). Well, at least in the sense that it's a mystery game. I'm going to be honest, I just really want someone to go into that game blind and show it the type of love that you've shown this, Scratches, Welcome to the Game 2, etc. I played the game (Obra Dinn) with my brother after we played Papers Please (another Lukas Pope game) and unknowingly stumbled upon a hidden gem. Really, I cannot recommend it enough. It has an amazing art style and a wonderfully written — and period accurate — story! I'd love to see your take on it.

Amazing video by the way! I've been binging your video essays for the past few days now and I just can't get enough. There's just so much care and joy in it. I'm looking forward to seeing more from you in the future!

The hunch bunch struggling with the books actually got me laughing so hard

When you tried to leave the town early, guessed the wrong conclusion, and "just published slander." In the words of J. Jonah Jameson, "It is not! I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print it's libel."

Not normally a commenter, but this work is so well done I want to bring attention to it! You are an amazing story teller

So me and a friend played through this game side by side and honestly we found it really good, there's a single point we got stuck and that was finding the ducking road drain with the key because we just couldnt find it next to the church but right as we were gonna look it up my friend found it. but that was the only point we got stuck on

i love that you took the longest and most hints but also knew who the murderer was first and without any help

I get what guy with a chainsaw is getting at, but I disagree.

In the event that you're totally stuck and you have to brute force it to make progress, that is indicative of either: poor game design or poor detective work. In some instances it could just be bad luck, like not noticing a key on a desk for example. That sort of rides the line between poor game design and poor detective work imo. You should be combing every inch of everything, but if your key doesn't look like a key, or it's not obvious you can open more than one drawer, that's hardly the players fault.

So if you're completely stuck and have to brute force it, you might as well look up a guide, because solving a puzzle by guessing random numbers over andnover isn't going to be any more satisfying. And if that's fair game, you might as well give players the option to just destroy boxes and desks to get at clues if they get frustrated. Can't find the code? No worries. Just take one of those axes and smash it open. That's just good detective work, right?

And there's what you did. In this kind of brute forcing, there literally is not detective work. Plugging a random number sequence you found into every slot it could possibly fit takes zero deduction. It doesn't look like fun either. I agree with your original assessment here: it's basically just cheating.

A better solution would be to snap a photo and just hold onto it until it makes more sense. If there isn't anything that points you to a code and you find it randomly, you should probably assume that you don't know what it goes to and you'll find that clue later.

However, I think the location of thr code is poor game design here. The key is in the flower pot and there just so happens to be flower pits DIRECTLY next to a very important code that you're not supposed to find until act 3?? Come on guys. You can put it somewhere more hidden than that. Or at least remove the unnecessary flower pots so players don't go hunting in that area.

Basically, if player is using brute force to "solve" puzzles then either that player has zero patience and is more concerned with the win than the story (idk how you felt exactly but to me it seemed like you were focused on the win, not the mystery) or you have made the puzzle too difficult or convoluted.

Imo, brute forcing it is NOT valid detective work. Its lazy.

«There’s no dude in a hoody, you made him up»… Yeah, for sure

i think something like how outer wilds has an info log that explicitly tells you when there’s more to explore in an area would’ve maybe been good for this game too (alongside telling you if you can’t solve something until later), maybe that’s too handholdy?

still, it would certainly be amazing for the unfortunately common super small mistakes that end up having big consequences, as seen in most of these playthroughs (especially since i’m sure getting stuck on something for so long in a game like this frustrates many stubborn people into looking up the answer instead of giving up, aka people like me lol)

I caught Scott being Sophia and Charles' child the moment their affair was revealed, and I'm SO glad I was right

I think the halfway and early ending are appropriate.. Though its dumb asf that the news is publishing your story regardless of the real story, being asked if you have all the evidence would be reasonable.
Maybe there should’ve been more evidence you need to have picked up to use as evidence. You should be fired for half assed detective work even if you’re only halfway OR you should only be able to publish half of the story and get a lesser rating, encouraging people to go back and find more evidence. Some people will be satisfied knowing they did answer the only question being asked, but giving an incentive to finding the whole picture by making your win lesser just because theres more is video gamey enough to still be realistic. Some people could settle for part of the story, even irl when reading news, but some people will still ask questions, maybe there could be news fan reviews/responses that could ask the questions you never truly answered.

jen is an absolute beast 🤯
and i'm only 7mins in the vid

I just started this video and I need a clip of that "box" snippet. I swear I've heard it before and how he pronounces is so funny in relation to y'all's investigations

I was debating a similar mechanic as their "solve it early" thing for a project I'm working on and I landed on this:

1. If you leave early and guess who it was correctly but without the main pieces of evidence, the person would be found not guilty due to lack of evidence and they would disappear after the trial. (Different from guessing incorrectly, where the accused would stick around and sue you for sucking at your job)

2. If you figured out who it was with the main pieces of evidence but without any other evidence from the scene, something bad would happen to some of the other characters (as evidence to stop said thing was not found).

In a game with this many characters, most of which are dead, the second option would not be entirely viable as the consequences for the dead would just be beating a dead horse (quite literally). I guess TLDR: consequences to the player character and/or the characters they care about would be the main way to poke them the way you want to go.

Honestly, Steve Moss was such a messy P.I. He dropped so much stuff that would have impeded his own investigation. No wonder he got murdered.

Part 1: "The Mayor of Candor didn't lie, did he..."
Part 2: "...he did 😔"

(I'll eat my hat if one of the devs wasn't a Harry Chapin fan.)

This is a fascinating series, I'm really enjoying the comparisons between gameplay! I often wonder how players are meant to solve puzzles as someone who frequently gets riddles """incorrect""" for coming up with alternative solutions.

Regarding Brute Forcing: The most unreal part of this for me isn't even the ghosts, which I very much do not believe in. It's going to an ABANDONED town to investigate, and not bringing lockpicks or a couple of different lishis. Who is gonna stop me?

I'm just a registered nurse. I think locks are cool. I bought some lockpicks online back in 2013 for like $30, and read one guide online to learn how to pick locks (and then a couple years later started watching The Lockpicking Lawyer and learned some more tricks). I've picked locks AT WORK (one time a kid locked himself in an exam room during the extended shift I worked after everyone but three of us went home, another time we had a cabinet no one knew the location of the key for, and one of the MAs locked herself out of her 1988 Chevy). If I can do it on a whim for a six pin security lock with just a couple years of fiddling with them as a hobby, there's no way I would, as an investigator, be getting hung up on basic wafer or pin/tumbler locks. The cross and light switch puzzle lock, sure! A six digit combo lock, why not. But even a four digit combo lock can be brute forced in like 70-80 minutes even if you start with 0000, go sequentially, and the answer ends up being 9999. And if the whole place is gonna get demolished, why not break and saw anything wooden? It's like you said with the whole place being untouched by looters. And everyone being immaculate journalists. And the lights still working. 😂

Watching this video, I think you dismiss a lot of the side journals for not providing info for the main case, for example the last Vivian diary. I think they all provide cool insight into how every person in town was seeing the murders, and also let you realise how 80% of the cast is actually awful. Vivian's case for example shows she herself would embezle founds at the drop of a hat, since she took them out of the fundation, but as we know got royally pissed when Dr. Johnson did it. Maybe I'm just a bit naive, but I had a pretty positive view of most characters before reading their thoughts, and ended up only feeling bad for the Trisha, Scott, Derrick, Andrew, Dorothy, Sofia and Matthew after reading everyone else's. And even them were no saints.

For example I ended up solving the secret bookcase puzzle in Charles studio right before the very end of the game because only then I realised I hadn't found anything about it (I thought I would get a clue later), and thought to look at the book again. I think that's one of the few places where you can actually see Magdalene's writtings directly and shows how much pressure she's putting on Charles. It gives her and Charles more small nuance.

I guess I'm just saying I didn't really feel I was getting useless information at any point during my playthrough

Maybe I didn't expect the sheer amount of actual killings that would end up happening lol

So far these videos are incredibly good, just as fun as playing the game itself.

The book puzzle was painful to watch. Haha so many missed clues and opportunities. This was fun to watch.

As soon as I heard "like back in the orphanage days" I'm like oh shit it was revenge for love....

CRIMINALLY underviewed. kudos, man

Holy shit dude, might as well have played with a walk through opened in another tab. How can you really judge whether a game is doing a good job at being a mistery if you are going to look up for help outside of the game itself? It's a good thing you had other people's perspectives.

Lol my guy finally saw the ghost woman, ADMITS he saw the ghost woman, and still sticks with his "guy in a hoody" theory. That is hilarious 😂

I also went to Andrew's house after Act 1 and either I didn't see the ghost or she wasn't there.

I don't see how exploiting game mechanics is "good detective work", the comment your referred to seems to be doing some impressive mental gymnastics to reach this conclusion. "Looking through trash" and other examples he brought up is still interacting with our world within the bounds of physical reality, he's not exploting physical laws of our universe. And that's exactly what you'd be doing in the game if you were to exploit game mechanics - you'd be interacting with the game's world in an unintended way. Exploiting and meta-gaming is the complete opposite of performing a realistic investigation.

Being sick finally gave me the reason I needed to actually sit down and finish this series. I always stopped on part 2 cause I got distracted with life stuff. Thank for the vibes you provided on my sick day. 🫶

The narration acting like a different person from the play through adds a lot of humor

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