Post Mortem (PC) review "As a dated adventure game you could suggest that Post Mortem is a dying practice."

Post Mortem has this weird habit of uncannily providing almost the exact amount of things to enjoy and things to frustrate, leaving me in a weird perpetual sense of indecision. It reaches its hodgepodge of sporadic highlights when it decides it wants to be a Noir game; to that end, retired private dick Gustav McPherson is lured back into service for just one more job by a seductive, mysterious woman. The crime to investigate? MURDER! The dame’s sister and brother-in-law have been mercilessly slaughtered in their hotel bed, then decapitated and left purposefully posed, holding their own heads. The client doesn’t trust the police, she says, bloating her genre cliché count with reckless aplomb. Gus is her handpicked man for the job, she says, because she can count on him to be discreet.

The problem – or, at least, one of them -- is that it’s not content just being a crime thriller; it wants to weave supernatural elements into its tale. For example, Gus isn’t just a standard retired gumshoe; he’s a clairvoyant of sorts, able to catch glimpses of the past or present. Which might feel like playing detective with a cheat code on but doesn’t ever really amount to much. The spooky horror stuff is mainly left to be played out in tale rather than practise, so the last leg of the game is loaded with ancient cults and shadowy resurrections that Gus treats as minor annoyances rather than cosmic revelations. They’re just padding; he has a job to do.



Post Mortem is simply a better game when the job is the sole focus, because it wants you to invest hard in the investigation. It’s just not always that great at regulating all your progress through old fashioned sleuthing. Very old fashioned, seeing as the game takes place in 1940s Paris (because Noir tropes!). The bulk of the work is solved through dialogue exchange rather than traditional inventory puzzles because it’s a very detective-y thing to do. Gus will question a witness, cross check the statement with other relevant parties and slowly build a timeline of events. It’s satisfying when it works out, but Mortem has a habit of throwing up roadblocks. The biggest one of all being why would he have to spend so much time trying to build a picture of the past when he has the magical ability just to see it whenever the plot demands?

Rather than compliment it, the horror often seems to go out of its way to trip up Gus’s sensible investigation, and it could really do without the obstacles when it often stumbles on its own merits. It’s undeniably satisfying playing witnesses off each other until you have a clear picture of an important circumstance, aided by a surprisingly good calibre of voice actors and a genuinely relatable support cast of miscreants, onlookers and ne’er-do-wells. But all the backtracking is painful, especially when Mortem employs the point & click version of tank controls. Rather than a traditional third-person affair where the protagonist chases your mouse cursor around at your pleasure, Microïds uses a first-person view, similar to their earlier games like Amerzone and Dracula: Resurrection. Sometimes, this perspective is a genuine boon, letting you experience locations more intimately. The thing it’s worst for is travelling. Having to shuffle back and forth between characters to cross check their latest kernel of gossip is a grind.

And so it goes, always devouring its own theoretic excellence. It’s great that the game has four different endings that hinge on both a moralistic choice made near the endgame as well as the strength of your investigation. To get the best ending, you need to have been the best detective, solving a myriad of little conundrums to build the best case possible. You can cast doubt on people’s true identity, backing it up with hidden identification and thought-destroyed heirlooms. You can champion the case of the previously hired P.I., currently serving as a convenient scapegoat for the crimes the police can’t solve. Except you can be locked out of completing these things and never even know. Say the wrong thing in one of the game’s many, many, many conversations, and certain objectives are lost to you forever. It’s not cruel enough to trap you in an unfinishable game state, but being denied the perfect ending because you failed to randomly lie to a desk clerk about being an investigator and instead professed to be a travel agent is a cheap shot.



It's the same pattern though. There’s an imaginative late game puzzle about plucking clues out of a fresco that becomes significantly less impressive the more it employs the very worst element of pixel hunting. Inventory puzzles are usually the most reality-based part of Post Mortem but sometimes feel included more out of obligation than design. Early on, you come across a locked door with the key still in the lock on the other side – it’s a common puzzle most of you will be familiar with. You slide some paper under the crack of the door, use something like a pencil to poke the key loose, which falls on the paper. Reclaim the paper, obtain the key, unlock the door. The solution was obvious, the execution, not. Despite being in a room with countless items that could be used for this simple slice of breaking and entry, you need to wait until later in the game when you can obtain the precise items the game wants you to use. Much, much later in the game. At a point where you’d be forgiven for forgetting why you were searching for such items in the first place.

It means Post Mortem is unfocused while it chases complexity, when it could have been a tighter game with a tighter focus. Someone must have agreed because it did spawn a spin-off series of games in Still Life that becomes less and less about supernatural shenanigans and more about trying to catch horrific murderers. You can tell they’re from the same series, though; it makes it even that more convoluted than it has to.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (October 16, 2023) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.