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Here’s one for those of you that enjoy an odd little bit of indie storytelling: Blood on the Thames is a “murder mystery puzzle game with visual novel elements in a Gothic, Lovecraftian world.” In it, your sleuth must solve a supernatural murder in a Victorian London still reeling from the Jack the Ripper murders.
You play Minerva “Mini” Ernest, whose husband was killed in a bizarre incident with a spiral cut up his leg. With the police unable to solve the mystery you hunt down the cause across Victorian London “from the alabaster mansions of high society, to the coal-stained factories of the Industrial Revolution, to the watery depths of the sewers beneath the city.”
The occult overtones of the story quickly take a cosmic twist, overtly bringing in the influence of Lovecraft-style cosmic horror and a gothic milieu that I found pretty compelling conceptually. Most of all is the strange, scratchy black-and-white aesthetic of the entire game and the oddities that abound in it—so many handwritten or oddly-typed notes and weird little statues and interface elements that seem more to be of the world you’re inside than of a videogame. It’s cool stuff.
I’ll be honest, after time with the demo Blood on the Thames is a bit janky at the edges but I think it has an admirable quality. The imperfect writing sort of accompanies the strange vibe of the entire aesthetic to give a kind of found-footage quality to it that I suspect plenty of other people out there will enjoy for what it is.
I suspect many of those people will also be fans of that weird game where Sherlock Holmes fights Cthulhu.
You can find the demo for Blood on the Thames on Steam, where it will release this month.
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Kurt Indovina
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