The Invisible Hours (2017)

This game caught my interest in being both a murder mystery and set during the late 19th century, a favorite time period of mine. It was originally a VR only game, but they updated it to be available to us plebs without a VR headset.

To call this a “game” would be a bit disingenuous, and the developers fully embrace that. When you first start it up a title screen tells you, “This is not a game, this is not a movie. It is an interactive performance.” The extent of the gameplay is your ability to rewind and pause time, which you need as there are events that are happening at the same time, and you can’t be everywhere at once. Other than that you can explore the house to find little notes that add backstory to the characters and mystery. Limited gameplay isn’t a huge surprise given this was a VR title and those tend to lean more towards “experiences” over “games”.

The story is presented in a very unique style that I have to give the devs credit for. There’s a cast of 7 or so characters in a mansion that serves as the stage for this play. That’s really what this game feels like, a theater production. The way the voice actors perform their lines, the fact characters like to monologue to themselves, and at certain points you can see characters basically waiting in the wings for their cue. And the performances given are top-notch, much better than I expected, this is above a community theater level production. The fact you are witnessing a mystery in a manor does give the story a strong Agatha Christie vibe too.

You are a omniscient, invisible viewer who watches this mystery unfold. While you can play detective passively by collecting documents and you have to, because the main story doesn’t spell everything out, and try to piece the plot twists together beforehand, you have no actual input on the story. You can’t influence the story or help the characters in any ways. I appreciate that you have to draw some conclusions and everything isn’t spoon-fed to you, but there were times I wish I could have an effect on the plot.

So, the characters in this play, as such, this will be spoiler territory. Most of the characters are established archetypes, but they are well written and excellently acted. Nikola Tesla has invited 7 seemingly random people to his island mansion to help them “make their mistakes undone”. The last person to arrive, and the sorta main character is the Swede, Gustav, a disgraced detective with a drinking problem. You follow him as he enters the mansion to find Tesla has been murdered. He then interrogates the other guests to find the killer. There’s Clara, Tesla’s ex-assistant who is a bit mysterious, and seems to know more about Tesla’s experiments than she lets on. You can learn from clues that she lost her husband in WWI. There’s Mr. Swan, Tesla’s blind black butler, but we learn later, surprise, he’s pretending to be blind, because it helped him get the job, I think? We get a Vanderbilt/Carnegie-esque wealthy heir in Ed Vanderberg. He has some daddy issues, suicidal tendencies, and a random character trait that is mentioned only once and doesn’t have any other bearing on the plot is he is a homosexual. Victor Mundy is the odd man out at this party as he’s a lowbrow English street tough that murdered his wife and tried to kill his daughter. He sorta fluctuates between being a violent psycho & a man who found religion and wants a second chance. There’s another guest that shares some history with Victor that you can learn through hints before they officially reveal the twist at the end. That guest is Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress. She tries to manipulate all the men at the party and get them wrapped around her finger. The final guest is the only other real historical figure, Thomas Edison, because you can’t have Tesla without Edison. He is as egotistical as you’d expect him to be. The world revolves around him, so he believes and it’s made him obnoxious and paranoid. He’s also overcompensating for the fact that most of his genius is stolen from others. He’s a fun character to hate.

How the plot unfolds is, again, kinda unique and a bit confusing to explain, spoilers here too. Because while you know everything that happens the characters don’t. Early on Vanderberg tries to kill himself by poisoning the whiskey he’s nursing in his room. Later on, Edison helps himself to the bottle and then assumes that someone is trying to kill him, even though the whiskey was just a random bottle he found. This leads him to later kill Vanderberg. We know it was him that killed Vanderberg and why, but Gustav the detective has to figure it out, which he does get the right suspect, but for the wrong motive. Sarah comments to Edison, “You’d like to make love to me?”, but we know from watching her in her room that she is simply reciting a line she practiced to manipulate men. There’s all sorts of little moments like this where you can have an almost smug feeling of having “secret” knowledge and it makes the game feel unique. There are a few little moments that are good scenes, but seem unrelated to any other plot or character point.

Unfortunately the ending drops the ball hard. There’s hints throughout the game that Tesla was working on technology with a spiritualist bent, such as astral projection and talking with the dead. I figured the twist would be, we the player were actual the “science ghost” of Tesla watching his murder investigation unfold. That was not the case. There was time travel introduced and we use it to see that Clara went back in time to kill Tesla for reasons, but with any time travel story, it raises questions. At the end of the story there are two Claras in the timeline, but we never see what happened to that 2nd Clara, did she use the machine again or just hide out for the whole story? Also, by the end, Gustav figures out Edison is guilty of at least Vanderberg’s murder, but through a misunderstanding, Swan thinks Gustav killed Tesla and thus tackles him off a cliff. We never get any closure to our murder mystery; does Gustav survive that fall? Is Edison caught? Instead the game gets a bit cryptic about the true ending, and it’s basically Tesla explaining how he faked his death and travelled around time, and how you have to also have to die and pretend to be him. It’s just all lackluster and doesn’t answer the questions I was more concerned about.

All in all, this is a good experience with acting that was much better than I expected. This game feels much like The Council, but without losing faith in their story 3/4 the way through. I wished the player had a more active role, but heck, for a deep sale, I’d recommend this game. The theater play aspect is cool enough for that price of admission.