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Saluting the Commodore, October 11, 2023In the interest of full disclosure, I'm probably not Artful Deceit's intended audience, at least format-wise. The closest I have come to interacting with a Commodore 64 is the other retro game in this competition. But the mystery and the interesting format caught my interest, and so after trying two emulators I jumped in.
Artful Deceit is an affectionately goofy detective game, the kind where a detective's job is more about solving puzzles than breaking alibis. It is emulating (so to speak) a very retro, barebones style of play, with crucial information to be found in the lovely feelies, and only a few verbs. But by that same token I was never majorly confused about what was interactable in the room. The puzzles in the sections I completed were sensible and didn't require any bizarre leaps of logic. (Although the hints allude to a puzzle where you (Spoiler - click to show)press buttons around the sculpture--somehow this did not happen when I played. The (Spoiler - click to show)magenta button was visible to me when I entered the room, and so I (Spoiler - click to show)pressed it and obtained the device right away.)
The biggest hurdle I encountered was simply navigating the house, especially when trying to get into and out of the garage. It is a very large space relative to the number of rooms that can be interacted with, and when the hardware/emulator takes 5-10 seconds to transition between rooms, the time added up. I also struggled with the emulator itself. I had several crashes, and at one point accidentally started editing over the text of the game. I don't know how much of that was the emulation vs. me (as mentioned at the beginning), but after a third crash that was fairly far through and running up against the judging time limit, I had to call it quits.
