Murderous Muses

My first run through Gallery Argenta ended with a wrong accusation, a creeping sense that I had missed something important behind every painting, and an immediate desire to go back in. That tension - the productive kind, the kind that keeps a notebook close by - is what D'Avekki Studios have quietly mastered over four games, and Murderous Muses is their most ambitious swing yet. The setup drops you into the role of a night security guard on Mirlhaven Island, one year after artist Mordechai Grey was murdered and never avenged. Six of his final portraits hang in Gallery Argenta, each one a suspect: Lilith the undertaker with a dietary secret she would rather you not look into, Otto the ventriloquist whose puppet Pip is somewhere between comedy and menace, Xavier the clockmaker wound too tight for comfort, Sunday Finch the tennis player who may or may not have a twin, the Vice Justice Professor Catherine Myers, and burlesque dancer Dominique Serrant. Every playthrough assigns the guilt differently. The gallery layout shifts. The puzzle solutions rotate. Even the seed you started on can be shared with a friend, which is a small, lovely touch that almost no one covers. The core rhythm runs across three days and three nights. During the day you pull paintings from crates and match them to name plaques on the walls - hang the right portrait above the right plaque and the subject springs to life as an FMV clip, burning through one of the precious Eyes of Mordechai orbs you have rationed per painting. Running out of orbs before you have unlocked a crucial police interview is genuinely stressful in the way only resource-scarce deduction games can be. Puzzles unlock bonus treasure rooms, and a persistent trophy room collects your finds across runs. Over three hours of filmed footage sits behind those portrait frames, and the performances are where the game earns its warmth. Aislinn De'Ath as Lilith is a recurring D'Avekki anchor, and Rikki Stone as Otto manages to make a ventriloquist act feel unsettling rather than campy. The honesty part: the 3D gallery environment is sparse in a way that critics and players have been upfront about. Bland repeated textures, blocky geometry, a depth-of-field effect that sometimes swallows detail rather than adding atmosphere. The FMV sequences glow; the corridors between them feel like a mid-budget game from two console generations back. There is also a real friction point around keyword hunting - finding the exact phrase needed to unlock a police interview can tip from satisfying detective work into blind trial-and-error, and the tutorial repeating on every fresh run will annoy completionists hunting all six suspect arcs. First-timers should expect to feel lost for a while. The game offers no hand-holding, which is a feature for some players and a wall for others. For the audience who will love this - FMV fans, mystery readers who want something interactive, anyone who has ever kept physical notes while playing a Sherlock Holmes adventure - Murderous Muses rewards patience with a genuinely layered cast of characters, each carrying their own self-contained horror story inside Mordechai's lore-rich island. The procedural scaffolding means the ten-to-fifteen hours needed to see everything feels fresh rather than mechanical. It knows what it is: a small, handcrafted whodunit that asks you to think, sit with uncertainty, and come back. That is rarer than it sounds.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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