In short interactive movie/murder mystery Proxy by Sonoshee, eight people with seemingly nothing in common find themselves trapped on an elevator. Help can't come soon enough because when the lights go out, a being calling itself "Proxy" kills one of them, and will continue to do so unless they can figure out who Proxy really is... and kill them first. Made in a short period of time as an experiment to learn Unity, Proxy is extremely light on interaction and could use a bit of polish with the text, but offers a creepy-cool whodunit with two endings... though only one of them is good, and considered "true".
Well, that's weird. No matter what decision I make at the end, the game just hangs, and no other action seems possible. Am I missing something?
I found that leaving the game on 'fast forward' led to the conclusion hanging, but doing it at normal speed meant it worked okay.
Good news, you get to reload and wait through the whole thing again!
I played this on Newgrounds since Unity wouldn't load one JiG, and the creator has fixed the ending bug.
That being said, I didn't really enjoy this game. The text is either really slow or incredibly fast, and the sole choice is pretty obvious once you do it once.
Thanks for the tips. Looks like this one just isn't going to work for me. I didn't think I'd used FF the first time, and I'm sure I didn't the second, but it still hung at the end. Same on Newgrounds (though there I did use FF, because gah.)
My game is stuck. Seems there's a bug when you use the fowarding option too long. The text is either fast or slow. The pace of the game is also slow. I am not going to re-load in hopes I don't get another frozen game. Unless the bugs get fixed, it's just a waste of my time. :/
I tried it on Newgrounds and it still hangs after every ending I pick. Really disappointing.
That's weird, it didn't hang any when I played it on Newgrounds.
So the whole thing comes down to watching it all play out, then making one choice at the end. Not much of a game, IMO.
For those of you who can't figure it out, here's a hint-through for the game, eventually revealing the solution.
Proxy's obviously highly intelligent.
Since Proxy's highly intelligent, he won't choose someone who will give him away.
Proxy knows who the primary protagonist is, and that Maxwell is highly intelligent.
However, he also knows how everyone else will react.
To sum up the hints, Proxy is an extremely intelligent being who kills for fun. He also knows how his victims will react, and he knows that he's made his opponent one of the most intelligent human beings. Presumably, this means that that human is aware of complex logic and reasoning. Who's the least likely to be suspected?
Solution:
Jordy, the mental patient, as Proxy doesn't expect that anyone as intelligent as Maxwell would choose what most people consider the most obvious choice.However, Jordy is the most innocent, as she has the most evidence against her. Therefore, Proxy would choose Jordy because Maxwell would eliminate her as a suspect immediately.
Actually, what gave it away for me was that
Jordy moved after he was "killed".
I was ready to suspect anyone, even
myself.
I'm not sure Maxwell could be considered the 'sharpest' detective.
Jordy reacts to someone having a gun for defense only after said person calls him out on being wrong about the mental treatment at that hospital. Of course, Maxwell doesn't even ask for the truth from Jordy. It just gets dropped after the accuser dies. Until the "It's you Jordy!" dialog.
He doesn't react to Maxwell having a gun, even though it was revealed. Before, even. So that means he knew Maxwell was telling the truth about the detective thing.
There's also the 'my dear friends' thing, that was pointed out by a character before they died.
Taken alone the whole 'person who accused me of lying, I accuse them back and they die' could be a misleading tactic. After all, it's a valid strategy in the party game Werewolf/Mafia. But it just adds suspicion to an already suspicious person. Maxwell certainly wasn't thinking of that possibility though, so that can't be an excuse for him. He outright stated that the person who died would confirm it for him.
When you want to make your choice before the first victim of the game is offed, not counting the throwaway character before the announcement of the 'game' by Proxy, then it's just poor writing. Especially when that choice is the right answer.
So yeah, Maxwell is right to blame himself. Even if he wasn't sure about it, he sure is to blame for the last death in the 'Proxy loses' end. He gloated and explained his reasoning, then freaks out about being 'wrong' when Proxy fakes his death. He could have left with four corpses in the elevator instead of five. Three, if he hadn't done the 'confirm my theory' thing. And of course, Two if it would have let me shoot when I wanted to instead of the end.
What, does he only have one bullet? If so, then he could have just grabbed the other gun.
I really think they just gave Maxwell the award/certification/whatever just to avoid giving him a pay raise/bonus. And they stuck him on the Proxy case because it was a dead end case. Come to think of it that's really plausible. Serial killer cases, with no evidence. For the guy who is apparently only allowed a single bullet, and does foolish things.
Only slightly smarter than the other gun user who outright states they're undercover. Though Maxwell probably would have done the same thing.
This was basically the movie "Devil". I was completely ready to kill anyone too, but it really comes down to
noticing that one person moved, and that only happens after halfway through the game making the first half pointless.
The text crawl does seem a bit slow, but the fast forward button helps. I did run into the freeze bug at the end once, but I think if you stop before the last person is killed before you choose it should be fine.
Like they said there are two endings good and bad, so it's stale as soon as you finish both, but I do hope that this could possibly continue into a larger sequel with a bit more of a challenge.
I could put up with the aforementioned glitch, lumpy translation and overall poor presentation of this game, if only it had stayed true to its central premise.
Proxy (the character) operates by possessing a human body and using that body to act in the physical realm. At the point of decision, there was no evidence whatsoever against Aleph and I wasn't allowed to shoot Maxwell, so the culprit had to be one of the alleged corpses.
Four of the five corpses are pinned in place. I don't care what kind of plot-convenient hoodoo you're got going on; once you've somehow managed to stick a spear all the way through your own shoulder, your arm on that side is going to be useless for a good long while, and forget about trying to spear your other shoulder while you're in that state. The notion that Jordy pinned himself to the wall in this manner is frankly ridiculous, but the game expects us to believe that he did it twice.
Meanwhile, the first victim has freedom of movement throughout. The fake hanging has been a staple of crappy horror/mystery stories almost as long as the real thing. The elevator is stopped, but Laurie continues to swing long after her initial momentum should have petered out. She could have slipped the noose off and on at any time in the dark; even if she didn't, her tether seems long enough to allow her to reach the people by the elevator walls.
Am I completely off-base for thinking that Laurie moved Jordy (who was just way too obvious and anyway, characterizing the mentally ill as psycho killers is old hat) in order to throw off suspicion when she killed Amelie?
This game actually just seemed like a copy of the movie Devil (the one where 6 people get trapped in an elevator and are murdered one by one as the lights go out).
To be fair, that concept has been around since Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Still, I thought Devil was a pretty entertaining and fresh take on the trope, while this game really came off as more of a fan's homage to the movie than an original idea.
Oops, just realized that you totally called the game's similarities to Devil before me. I'm glad someone else noticed that!
Well, I actually finished the game a while later that day. The bug was fixed on the author's website, not Newgrounds. Unfortunately I found the story/gameplay very poorly executed for a "mystery".
I agree with rococoroecocoa:
I definitely was thinking of Laurie the first time around, and was actually disappointed to find out it was the most obvious answer. With Jordy lying about the mental institution and having the same "my dear ____s" tick as Proxy, I thought he had to be a red herring, though beyond his excuses there was no real explanation of that behavior.
What I find amusing about the fast-fowarding feature is that
I immediately figured it out through watching the whole thing fast-fowarded (I opened another tab the first few times trying to get past the hang) because only a few seconds pass during the blackout where Jordy's body moves. It becomes so much easier to notice.
Update