Murder on Space Station 52 review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

An unusual but stellar blend of traditional future-noir detective investigation and intriguing sci-fi setting

Oh look, another sci-fi adventure game set on a space station! But wait a minute, as even if you’ve had your fill of such games, solo developer Made From Strings knows how to make Murder on Space Station 52 stand out among titles with a similar setting. Instead of another lonely exploration game, it’s a fun hand-drawn murder mystery with quirky characters and a range of different puzzles to solve, all wrapped up in a point-and-click adventure that kept me entertained for a solid seven hours – but also made me question my own intelligence in places.

A swinging soundtrack – think a combination of Gabriel Knight’s Robert Holmes and Doctor Who’s Murray Gold – welcomes you to an Art Deco-style menu screen. Immediately it sets the tone of the story you’re about to embark on, that of a grisly murder mystery, but still with fun to be had.

Murder on Space Station 52 is a colorful detective future-noir mystery set on a station inhabited by all kinds of alien species and robots. It’s a large and rather peculiar space station, however, since it also holds a body of water with its own docks, islands and a lighthouse. It tends to rain now and then, and you’ll even encounter a couple of wind turbines. This “station” has the look and feel more of an alien planet, with weird plants and trees growing through the buildings and machinery.

You play as Edward Locke, a mechanical engineer who had an accident a long time ago and now has to wear a special suit to keep him alive. No, he doesn’t look anything like a certain dark lord in a black cape. Edward is sent to Space Station 52 to help out with its maintenance, only to be confronted by the corpse of his predecessor, secreted inside one of the many machines that need tuning. And so Edward starts trying to track down the murderer, following lead after lead from one location to another, meeting suspect after suspect, gathering clues, evidence and inventory along the way.

Murder on Space Station 52 brings a combination of different perspectives to the playing field. There are first-person puzzle screens and traditional third-person side views of indoor rooms, yet exterior locations usually have an isometric viewpoint. Either way, it’s a gritty, hand-drawn world brought to life by that bluesy soundtrack, which plays the same victory tune when you’ve successfully solved a puzzle. The set designs and diverse perspectives give the whole experience a more open feel than players might be used to from games with more typical extraterrestrial vessels and their small, dark corridors.

The game starts with a short prologue, designed to teach you the ropes of the user interface that is completely mouse controlled. You can examine objects or characters with a right-click, and interact with them with a left-click – but only when applicable. When you hover the cursor over a hotspot, it will show an image of both mouse buttons. When the buttons are white, their respective actions should be possible. However, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes clicking won’t do anything, and sometimes left- and right-clicks have the same effect. If you attempt to use an item, Edward might just give its description again.

It’s still a good idea to try to examine everything you see, because you get points for doing so. These points – called either “moxies” or “doodads” – can be exchanged later on when you’re able to access your “apartment” through the game’s menu. This becomes available once you reach chapter two (of nine chapters to puzzle through in total). Though not a “playable” area in-game, Edward’s apartment shows shadowy cutouts of objects you can collect: rocks and fish in your aquarium, posters on the wall, and all kinds of mementos for your shelves. They don’t serve any purpose beyond being simple collectibles, but it might help to take a breather and go “shopping” for a bit when you’re stuck on one of the harder logic puzzles.

Murder on Space Station 52

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Outer space, Whodunit
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Investigative
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

Also from the menu, as well as from your apartment, you can view the “murder board.” This is a traditional cop show cork board with photos of all suspects and red string connecting them, where you can review the evidence you have found to help you decide who you want to accuse as the true killer at the end of the game. You don’t have to make any other deductions or manually manipulate those strings, you simply observe and compare what you know about the killer to the characteristics of the suspects. At the start, each suspect has a list of bullet points with question marks that get automatically filled in as you uncover evidence. So heads up, because if you move through the storyline too fast and fail to examine all hotspots, you might miss a key element when it’s time to point the finger.

That happened to me, and I was extremely lucky to still correctly identify the culprit, since I was debating between two possible suspects. I did reload to see what would happen if I chose the wrong suspect. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that you return to the murder board for another guess. Which is certainly forgiving, but a missed opportunity to include a bad ending to the game as a consequence of your own failure.

The game is (almost) fully voiced. Edward’s actor is actually the developer Christopher Mathes himself, but he does a bang-up job performing with a mellow drawl, calling all females “dolls” and commenting on everything in classic noir P.I. style. During cutscenes, like when you transition between chapters, he narrates in the past tense, but when you’re actually playing he speaks in the present tense. The exception is when you open your inventory, during which Edward stays silent and you can only read his comments when you examine or try to combine the items he’s carrying.

The other characters, all aliens or robots, have highly distinctive voices. The local sheriff sounds a bit like Andy Serkis’s Gollum. The dockmaster comes off a bit slimy and liquid, like some kind of tentacle-faced offspring of Cthulhu. A local sculptor has a very mechanical-sounding voice, while a roaming reporter has an itsy-bitsy mousy delivery. Most of them speak English, but a couple have an alien tongue that Edward thankfully understands. All in all, it’s the kind of quirky cast you might expect in some spaceport’s cantina on a desert planet, and everyone wants something in exchange for allowing you access into the next location – hence the many inventory puzzles and fetch quests, which are all quite intuitive even though they might need a MacGyver mindset here and there.

Next to these traditional point-and-click puzzles, you’ll often face a hi-tech interface system, a weird-looking fuse box, or an abstract lock, plus lots more puzzles that need some kind of logic to solve. Usually you can figure them out quite fast, and you might even consider them disappointingly easy, but I did encounter two pretty hard brain busters that ultimately required outside help after a fair while spent trying to figure them out myself. One involved putting certain elements in the correct order, but I used a different – in my view more obvious – sorting system; the other involved some blinking lights and numbers, and I can honestly say that, even knowing the solution now, I still don’t know how you’re supposed to actually get to that solution.

Murder on Space Station 52 has an auto-save checkpoint system, but also allows manual saves. These are limited to only three save slots, but since it’s a linear game and you can’t die, you don’t really need more than that. But because you can’t backtrack through locations you’ve already left behind, it would’ve been handy to be able to revisit each chapter in which you meet a new suspect in case you overlooked one of the available question marks on the murder board when collecting evidence at the time. 

Final Verdict

Sci-fi games usually aren’t my cup of tea, but Murder on Space Station 52 is a mystery game first and science fiction game second, so it doesn’t bombard you with loads of alien lore or technical/scientific stuff. As such, it succeeded in not only holding my interest, but actually making it a lot of fun. Despite its extraterrestrial setting, it’s a pretty straightforward, well-acted detective-style point-and-click investigation combining fetch quests and problem solving and information gathering through examination of hotspots and talking to possible suspects. Most of the puzzles are quite easy, and the logic needed to be applied is pretty much common sense, albeit with a couple of blatant exceptions. It’s too bad there isn’t more actual detective work involved in ultimately pinpointing the murderer in the bunch, but it nevertheless succeeded in making a non-sci-fi gamer like me boldly go where I never really liked to go before.

Johnny played Murder on Space Station 52 on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher. 

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