It's A Mystery (Fest)

One thing Steam does really badly, in my opinion, is promote its own events. Even though I log in almost every day, all I ever seem to see is the pop-up window with the spot offers of the moment. Any wider promotions might as well not exist. If I hadn't read it about it on someone else's blog last month, I'd never have known there was another Next Fest running.

Equally, if I hadn't happened to have three particular titles on my wishlist, I might never have found out there's another event of considerable interest to me going on right now. It's called Mystery Fest, it runs until next Monday, and it "celebrates the spirit of investigation and solving mysteries—both big and small—with discounts and demos on current and upcoming mystery and detective games of all kinds."

I had to google to get that description because nothing on Steam itself actually explains what the event is about. All there is is a banner and you have to scroll down past the first page of the Store even to see that. The thumbnail definition above comes from Steamworks, "a set of tools and services that help game developers and publishers build their games and get the most out of distributing on Steam." 

Steamworks, as I'm sure everyone reading this already knows, is a very useful resource for anyone who might actually want to know what's going on with the platform. The Mystery Fest page there provides a wealth of detail on the event, including which genres of games are eligible:

• Mystery
  
• Detective
  
• Social Deduction

and which probably won't be:

• Combat-forward games, incl. superhero themes
  
• Spy games
  
• Straight puzzle games, incl. hidden object games, with no detective work / investigation
  
• Escape room games with escape rooms as the only mechanic
  
• Horror games that may include a mystery element but that do not focus on investigation
  
• Walking simulators without a primary focus on solving mysteries

As a potential customer, this is the sort of information I'd like to see prominently displayed on the Store page itself, not buried on an affiliate site aimed at developers. I wouldn't expect anything so straightforward from Steam, though. It's a  service that seems determined to make everything as cluttered and obscure as possible. 

I'm sufficiently inured to its quirks and foibles now that I no longer notice just how badly designed it is until something like this comes along to remind me. I feel we all probably have Stockholm Syndrome where Steam's concerned or it wouldn't still enjoy the dominant market position it does.

Anyway, through whatever circuitous route, I got there eventually and now here I am, doing unpaid marketing work for Valve, yet again, by passing the information on. The event includes some massive discounts on well-known titles but more importanrtly than that, it's a very useful opportunity for anyone interested in these kinds of games to see them all gathered in one place, with Steam's submission system, for once, doing the grunt work of sorting the wheat from the chaff, something the customer-facing search algorithm signally fails to do, at least when I use it.

I plan on going through the full card this week, using it to populate my wish list with games I might enjoy. It'll save time later. If anything's on heavy discount I might even buy it now. (Edit - I did. I bought two games and a bundle - Blacksad, Backbone and all five Broken Sword titles. I'm not embarassed to admit that 75% of everything I bought features anthropomorphic cats.)

And in fact I have already made a purchase. Two of the three games from my wishlist (Brok the Investigator and Scarlet Hollow) were just repeating the same 25% price cut that didn't inspire me to get my wallet out the last few times they tried it but the third hit 50% off, a trigger point I find harder to ignore. 

The game I bought was Nine Noir Lives, which I wrote about a couple of years ago, when I played the demo in the February 2021 Next Fest. At the time I called the demo "a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game". I've nearly bought it a few times since but the discounts were never quite steep enough to bypass my inner miser. At under a tenner, though, I couldn't resist any longer.

Nine Noir Lives has a Positive rating on Steam. Reading through the reviews, it's clear that the sticking point comes in the humor, described by some as as "comedy gold" but by others as "really lame/childish" and the voice acting, which is either "BEST I have EVER heard in any point and click game!" or "terrible, overzealous" and "trying too hard."

My own take, two years ago, was somewhat more equivocal, describing the main character as "nicely voiced, comfortable to listen to for long periods of time" but his assistant as "a little harder to take". As for the humor, it seems I didn't bother to mention it. I did, however, describe the writing in general as "professional and entertaining".

We'll see what I think of it once I've played through the whole thing. I'm sure there'll be some kind of review.

Meanwhile, to reiterate, there's a celebration of and sale on all things mysterious happening over at Steam and it lasts all week. Don't bother to tell Valve I sent you. I don't want them to get into the habit of thinking I'm going to do their job for them.