"Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus" is another in the series of Full Motion Video games by Wales Interactive. I had purchased a bunch of these on Humble Bundle and I'm slowly working my way through them... these narrative games are good in that they are relatively short in play time, so they are easy enough to finish within a week for a father who is constantly swamped by either work or family!

The Setup

You play as Abby, a somewhat normal university student with dreams of escaping her quite dysfunctional extended family. She is dutifully checking into a group video chat to "celebrate" her mother's birthday with everyone... and her mother's way of celebrating is to have a quiz with several pairing rounds. Sounds fun...

However, before the call starts... she gets a call from her beloved Uncle Marcus, who tells her that he has been poisoned, and he suspects that one of the extended family did it in a previous physical meeting for which you weren't present for. He begs you to use the quiz and the surrounding paired-off chats to try and discover what the poison was, why it was administered, and who did it. So a murder-mystery whodunit... without the dead body... yet!

The Game

So, this is the extended family... a lovely array of 6 people (plus Abby and Marcus) who absolutely loathe each other! They all have their highly identifiable characters, and they are played quite hilariously to the extreme by the actors...

In each round of the quiz, you choose from a short list of potential pairings to team up with... and then you are dumped into a breakout room. In this room, you are partly playing the quiz and fishing for answers and clues. This is the trickier part... and clues are released if you manage to navigate the conversation tree successfully. The navigation relies heavily on the answers that you give that resonate with the particular character that you are trying to get information from.

Marcus will chime in to give you a sense of urgency (fake... as the story development is pretty tightly choreographed!), and to whine about dying soon...

The end of each round will show you a wrap up of what potential tidbits of information were available and which ones you managed to uncover through your conversation choices. As you can see here, I was spectacularly unsuccessful this time around, there were two pieces of information and I managed to get none of it!

As you slowly accumulate evidence, you will start to build up a picture of what happened on that previous physical gathering... to cut a long story short, everyone was acting fishy and has secrets to hide... but only one of them poisoned Uncle Markus!

What will become quite apparent is that you won't be able to get enough clues to accuse anyone in your first playthrough. It will take multiple playthroughs to start to accumulate enough evidence to even progress past Marcus dying... let alone actually making it to an accusation scene. Thankfully, your gathered evidence persists throughout playthroughs, so you will start to build up a bigger picture of what happened... but sadly, the scenes are unskippable, so you will have to watch some of the scenes play out over and over again... but there are many new ones every time you pair off differently or choose different conversation branches.

Visuals, Sound and Performance

Well... the game looks great, you are essentially just watching an interactive movie after all. It does mean that game plays well on pretty much anything that can run a movie... but it also means that the game occupies a HUGE amount of storage space! Ah well, trade offs...

My Thoughts

Wales Interactive has gotten better and better with their FMV games... I'm sort of enjoying playing them these days... the writing is better and the acting is getting better every time... even if the underlying mechanic tends to stay the same.

I did enjoy my first few playthroughs of the Uncle Marcus, but after a while, the unskippable cutscenes got really annoying... especially the round intros and branches that you had already explored previously. In the end, I managed to accuse the killer correctly on my first accusation scene on incomplete evidence.. and the game didn't seem to care about that, which did mean that it was a bit story-holey!

After successfully finishing, I had no desire to play through multiple times to see the alternate endings and I ended up watching them all on YouTube. The alternates are hilarious, and definitely worth watching... I just wouldn't slog through the game lots of times to do it...

Review Specs

Played at 1080p (144Hz) on:

XMG Fusion 15

CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD (SATA/Nvme)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 2070 Max-Q

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