If I were a fish, I’d have been caught long ago. What do I mean by that? South Korean developer SUPERTHUMb’s latest game, Death at Fleming Manor, is aimed at everything I’ve said I enjoy for the past few years: A distinct, almost golden-age comic art style and the Return of the Obra Dinn/The Case of the Golden Idol puzzle gameplay. To be a little crude, you could tie me up like Zapp Brannigan and “torture” me for days with that kind of thing; it is my death by snu snu. Get used to death though, as it is all around.

Set in the fictional Buckinghamshire town/area of Cedarvale in the late 1950s, you are the new coroner set to determine who someone is and how they came to their deaths and/traumatic injury involving another’s death. With a total of 12 cases, you piece together the scene in a typical game detective way, not too dissimilar to the aforementioned Obra Dinn and Golden Idol; then you have to proceed with the conclusions of the investigation, placing the clues in your final reports. We’ll get into the being a pedant in a minute, but already many have run to Steam for Death at Fleming Manor.

There is no escaping the comparisons, they are even on the Steam page itself, but the investigation gameplay is a little more (for lack of a better word) precision-based. Within the setting, you need to get these things right because you aren’t working in insurance or whatever you were in The Case of the Golden Idol. Yet setting itself apart with some American influence alongside European comic art styles, Death at Fleming Manor is so distinct within this sort of sub-genre of job-based investigations. The thick outlines, the strong colors, and the era itself bring about a refreshing sense of style.

The first case, as is shown in the first and penultimate screenshots on Steam, is a dead woman in a car planted into a tree, a bloke left lying bloodied off his bike, and an alcohol bottle in the passenger’s footwell. Shock among shocks, the scene isn’t quite as it seems and you need to figure that out. Doing so requires looking through personal effects and the scene itself for blood, names, birthdays, clues on the time of day, and which direction the car came from. You could almost say it is a paperwork simulator.

Yet it is the way that it does it. It is the way Death at Fleming Manor sets its world up and tells about the world as you investigate these many different and sometimes gruesome deaths. The, I guess, problem therein is that sometimes it doesn’t feel as if you are “in control” the whole time. The second case (very light spoiler) will make you go over things again after directing you to one place, then revealing another after making it clear that what it had told you was correct, in fact, wasn’t. Which, in my opinion, doesn’t always make for a fun puzzle.

For a loose example: You are given a scene that isn’t quite right, but clues point in one direction. There is no open-endedness to cases; you will be told you’ve made a mistake with sugar cubes on a tea plate going from three down to zero before Death at Fleming Manor tells you how many things are wrong and where you are wrong. If you’ve been directed to one answer, as such, then a further revelation comes that you knew wasn’t being told to you, it doesn’t feel like a failure or a learning moment. You don’t make the decision; the metaphorical “gamesmaster” does.

That’s where my main gripe with Death at Fleming Manor stems from; there is a lot of story-based “ahh ha, but this magic object over here you didn’t notice before” type of circus trickery. It doesn’t ruin the gameplay entirely, but if you are coming into Death at Fleming Manor with the idea you are solving something, you’re kind of not. Especially with the way some of the “clues” are placed or explained. There was one with nurses’ schedule notes, and after finding the names to later identify people, you’re supposed to realize the names under drugs being taken aren’t that of patients but the individual nurses themselves.

I almost feel like I have to defend that, no, I’m not saying Death at Fleming Manor is bad, I’m simply noting its flaws. For me, it is the logic of the puzzles, but also how some of the gameplay elements interact. As seen on the Steam page, there is a World War II medical triage episode; in there, you can go back and re-triage a patient to correct a wrong answer. What’s quite annoying about that is that if you get patients 1, 4, 7, and 9 wrong, you need to go through them individually. It is small UX things like that which are annoying.

Before I move on, I also want to highlight an annoyance with audio. I get it, SUPERTHUMb aren’t a massive studio or one with decades of collective experience, but each case has a song or two to set the mood… and will be on a 30-45 second loop the whole time. Moreover, the audio balancing can be a bit off, with the aforementioned triage segment having a loud positive “brrring” sound on getting things right, a bit louder than everything else. So be warned.

So, if I am annoyed or frustrated by so much of SUPERTHUMb’s Death at Fleming Manor, why do I like parts of it? Probably because when it gets it right – trying to avoid story spoilers – and you nail whatever it is because you are paying attention, you do understand enough about anatomy and you understand post-mortem examinations, and you figure out someone’s wrongful death, punching the air and muttering mild profanity in excitement over a correct answer. Yeah, Death at Fleming Manor can get its puzzles right. It is fun and engaging. Not all the time, but when it is right, it makes you feel good.

Just as when you submit your paperwork after looking through the scene for the names of objects, people, and places to fill out the death certificate, then you get that “rejected” stamp after submitting. The profanity isn’t an exclamation of excitement, but just an exclamation of frustration at yourself. You know, (more or less) that you didn’t get it right. That’s when I think Death at Fleming Manor works; it does things right, it weaves its little story threads quite nicely without taking that sense of control out of your hands.

Though, if we’re being pedants as I suggested we would be for a moment, the idea of a coroner in the UK isn’t as prevalent as it is in the US or elsewhere. The job scope is very limited, and probably not as involved as this. So yes, suspend a little bit of disbelief there, but you also need to do so somewhat in the writing as well. Not necessarily the overall ideas, though some of the World War II elements aren’t entirely reflective of the time, but rather the character voice. As written in English, characters feel as if they are out of a modern anime rather than a period drama.

Make no mistake, there are flaws, and there are little nitpicks I could make that maybe don’t connect so well for one reason or another. Yet I am loving these paperwork job sim mysteries (a mouthful for a genre, I know) where you aren’t saving the world, you aren’t a superhero or a gun-toting angry man on a revenge path. You are just unraveling a story as it happens, and you aren’t the main character of that story. Plus, I am “biased” for a game that carves itself a unique art style within its own space.

Ultimately, Death at Fleming Manor isn’t bringing a full new breath of fresh air to a genre with its two inspirations high up the mountain, but it does enough where it matters. If I were looking for perfection, I’d have suggested SUPERTHUMb work on Death at Fleming Manor just a little longer to iron out its kinks, but realistically, no game is going to be perfect. If you’re the type of weirdo who enjoys media around forensic pathology (in this case, not the cutting up of bodies) and you enjoy mystery/puzzle games, you’ll enjoy Death at Fleming Manor.

A PC review copy of Death at Fleming Manor was provided by SUPERTHUMb for this review.

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Death at Fleming Manor

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Simple Obra Dinn/Golden Idol-like mystery gameplay.
• A beautiful art style.
• A great job-based setting.

Cons

• One or two logic "issues" with the puzzle elements.
• After 20 minutes, the music loop will annoy you.