Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(The following contains context spoilers for the event, and structural spoilers for WandaVision. Trust me, it will all seem elementary in the end. Also note that there is discussion of murder and apparent suicide, if those are topics you’d rather avoid.)
Puzzles. Escape games. Mysteries. Birds of a feather to be sure. But as the Great Detective himself would tell you, there’s a difference between a starling and a blackbird even if at a distance you might mistake the twain.
To be certain, Les Enfants Terrible Sherlock Holmes: An Online Adventure — The Case of the Hung Parliament is a mystery. Not quite of the locked room variety, even as some of us are still functionally locked in our rooms, but of the kind that the gentlemen at 221b Baker Street are regularly called upon to deal with. Only this time out while Mr. Watson is available to answer the call of Scotland Yard, it’s up to a motley group of Inspector Lestrade’s recruits to figure out the case.
The stakes could not be higher: three members of Parliament are dead. Each expired in the same fashion: apparent suicide by hanging in their personal office on their birthday. Today is the Prime Minister’s birthday and Holmes is off on assignment. No pressure.
Blissfully some of the heavy lifting has already been done for us. The suspects narrowed down to just five, all with at least the shadow of a motive. It’s up to the recruits — connected over Zoom at all times — to suss out the identity of the murderer over the course of examining the crime scene, combing through Scotland Yard’s files, testing forensic evidence, and interviewing suspects.
This is accomplished through a mixture of live-action (Dr. Watson is on hand in the form of a live actor who also acts as the gamemaster), 360-degree photos with point and click features, and interactive video segments.
Les Enfants Terrible are known in England for their live immersive performances, and they’ve worked everywhere from the fabled Vaults to Kensington Palace. From my vantage point in Southern California (I was the only American in my cohort), I’ve built up a picture of Les Enfants Terrible shows as having a flair for period production values and what I found in this Holmes adventure met those expectations.
Moreover, the team does a pretty good job of creating flow between the four platforms — Zoom, the interactive video platform Eko, 360 stills, and the web itself — to create a fairly seamless experience. Although, at one point the gamemaster played an Eko video through a Zoom screen share interface so more than one of us could see at a time, and that made things hard to read during a time crunch. This could have broken the game, but we toughed it out and got a proper result in the end.
Nevertheless, it didn’t feel like chaos to bounce between these different platforms and Zoom kept the center of gravity for the team interaction in a familiar spot. Could it have benefitted from a custom interface? Mayhaps. Yet that would have taken away development resources from the mystery itself, including actors, costumes, sets, and the physical ephemera, which was created and then digitized to create the proper mood. I wouldn’t trade that for a unified interface, although both together would be the dream.
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As for the mystery itself: if one is looking for a series of escape room-like puzzles with cryptographic features or a linear path, one might be disappointed. Les Enfants Terrible isn’t aiming to recreate what you might find in a well-themed escape room, but to set forth a Holmes style mystery. Albeit, one for people who aren’t quite as brilliant as the Detective himself.
As such, each of the potential suspects becomes a potential red herring as well, which can sometimes be a “no-no” in escape game design because of the frustration they cause. Yet, in a real mystery there are dead ends and red herrings and much of the detective’s work is about eliminating suspects as much as it is about piecing together the grand narrative of the crime.
The herrings on offer here do not, thankfully, stink to high heaven, but have enough of a contextual narrative weight to them as to seem reasonable. Even up to the last person, our jury was not unanimous in our selection (although the majority carried the day and properly identified our culprit). The experience and a discussion about the frustrations our Executive Editor had heard through the grapevine about the red herrings, got me thinking about the function of this narrative technique.
For much of my life the very term “red herring” has been synonymous with “bad writing” to me. Yet, here, I found myself enjoying the tension created as we narrowed the suspects down. The further we dug, the more plausible the remaining suspects became. Evidence at the scenes of the crime seemed to link to one here, and to another there, to the point where the patterns were getting difficult to tease out with the time restrictions given: the ticking clock of the impending doom of the Prime Minister.
What made these satisfying is that they were each rooted in the logic of the stories of the characters we had been presented with. The more we learned about our suspects, the more it seemed reasonable that they might have the motive that would lead them to kill over and over. Or, if not the motive, than at least the opportunity. There were clearly stories behind the circumstances of the circumstantial evidence, and it was not just the designers dropping hollow obstacles in our way or outright lying to us in order to throw us off track.
That got me thinking about how the last two episodes of the otherwise sweet and brilliant WandaVision played out. What looked like story beats in that show turned out to be red herrings, sometimes just lies that characters told each other (which then fit the pattern of what the creators were showing us), and, in one case, an elaborate meta gag that relied upon audience knowledge in order to make the audience the butt of a “boner” joke. And the latter made no sense in the context of the otherwise emotionally grounded lives of the characters in the TV series.
Like a starling and a blackbird viewed from a distance, it’s possible to confuse these two types of red herrings and yet the differences are important. In the kind that we find in Sherlock Holmes, there’s still the reward of a story uncovered. Yes, there was a pattern there, but you just thought it was more important than it really was, because you ignored the other evidence. As opposed to the alternative, where all the signs were present but there was never any story to be told. One approach suggests that the world has a complexity beyond the scope of what is in the gaze of the detective’s magnifying glass. The other approach suggests that you’re a bit of a fool for jumping at shadows even as the puppeteer puts out his torch.
It’s acase of wonder versus cynicism, if you will.
Luckily for us, Les Enfants Terrible are in the “wonder” game and the best of it all is saved for last. To say more would spoil the fun, but I’ll just say that the Devil is always in the details and the Devil’s game is certainly afoot.
If Holmesian mysteries are your thing, and I had nearly forgotten that they very much are my thing, you’d do well to take a turn at solving The Case of the Hung Parliament yourself.
Sherlock Holmes: An Online Adventure — The Case of the Hung Parliament is now booking through April 4. Tickets are £17.50 for a public event or £105 for a private event for up to six audience members.
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