14 DAY TRIAL // 
I speed through the gallery looking for a painting hanging spot marked with Job. When I find it, I slot in a portrait and click the word. My reward is a short video that reveals more about Otto and his puppet, as seen through the dead artists' eyes. It doesn’t help me solve his murder but reveals more about the community he lived in and its mysteries.
To get access to one of his police interviews, I need to look for another word in the sequence. But I have a feeling that, despite being a deeply troubled individual, he does not have the capacity for murder. I might actually raid his portrait for resources to get more opportunities to learn more about the rest of the cast of characters and their secrets.
This is only night two of my stay in the gallery. I learned plenty about Mirlhaven and how permeable it is to the supernatural. Before long, I will have to hang more paintings and eliminate more suspects. I don’t have a clear idea of who and why killed Mordechai. But there’s another long night of portrait videos to investigate for extra details.
Murderous Muses is developed and published by D'Avekki Studios Ltd. I played on Steam on the PC. The game is also offered on the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X and S, older platforms from Microsoft and Sony, and is coming to the Nintendo Switch. The title is a full-motion video murder mystery set in an intriguing universe.
The dead guy is named Mordechai Grey, which is quite the foreboding name to start the narrative off with. Players will travel to Gallery Argenta, where a new show features the artist’s most notorious paintings. As the night watch of this place, they will encounter the suspects associated with the Grey’s demise. They are known as the murderous muses (not all men) and hold the key to learning more about what has happened.
The six core characters are Dominique Serrant, Lilith Rendell, Xavier Hann, Otto Pipistrelle, Catherine Myers, and the Finch twins, played respectively by Bex Finch, Aislinn De’Ath, David John-Bores, Rikki Stone, Beth Gatherer, and Anna Fraser. They will feature heavily in the investigation but there are also secondary characters that make a contribution.
The action takes place over three days and nights. First, players will get a shipment of six paintings and have to find the right places to hang them in the gallery (although this seems a little outside the job description). Make sure to hit the button that offers a voice-over description about each to find out more about the island of Mirlhaven and what makes it unique.
Once this task is done, players will switch to the night watch, where most of the gameplay happens. The gallery shifts layout and whole new areas open up. Players get access to portraits of the six suspects, each featuring six Eyes of Mordechai.
These supernatural marbles allow players to place a portrait on a place featuring a keyword to get access to a short piece of video. They reveal things about the suspects, the wider island, and their relationships with the dead painter. When players complete a series of three specific prompts they get access to a police interview featuring that character.
Because each portrait can be used six times, it’s impossible to see all a character has to say. A recycling table offers gamers a way to plunder the portraits of the characters they aren’t interested in to give some extra charges to others. Each night a puzzle also appears, giving gamers who solve it access to another room and another set of keyword videos.
Before every night shift, players also have to drop one of their muse portraits, basically eliminating a suspect from the process. Make sure to explore the normal gallery wings at night and click on descriptions to find out even more about the title’s universe. Finally, the staff closet also changes in the dark, revealing dedicated rooms for every murderous muse, filled with ways to reveal even more secrets.
There’s not much variety to the actual gameplay in Murderous Muses. But the game has good pacing and moving through the gallery to search for words or match paintings gives players time to think about the main mystery and the suspects.
Videos are short and contain a clear nugget of information that, mixed with details from other sources, gradually reveals the quirks and outright tragedies of the island. Solving the murder is the main target but, by the game’s end, my goal was to see all six muses talk about all the featured subjects and uncover all their secrets (this can be done with multiple playthroughs).
Murderous Muses mixes full-motion video with a relatively small gameplay space. Players will move through the gallery and will hold conversations with the cast of characters, with the option to get all FMV sequences in full screen. The many featured paintings are evocative and, paired with their dual description, manage to create a sense of place and mystery even though players never leave the gallery space.
There’s a ton of dialogue in the game and the sound design is good. All the actors manage to walk the fine line between earnestness and over-the-top emotion, with some humor thrown in. There are a few moments when the tone feels weird but that’s to be expected given the level of complexity. The cast is good enough to keep players engaged for multiple playthroughs. The music is a little too generic murder mystery yet still adds to the atmosphere.
The Good
- Great setting and characters
- Good use of FMV
- Decent replayability
The Bad
- Limited gameplay
- A few weird video moments
- Lack of secondary puzzle variability
Conclusion
The gameplay is relatively limited, especially when it comes to hunting down that last keyword required to unlock a police interview. The presentation, the acting, and the plot are strong enough to keep players moving and thinking. Murderous Muse's quality should attract new players to the FMV genre while satisfying long-term fans.
A review key was provided by the publisher
