The Death of Erin Myers | PC Review

May 23, 2019May 23, 2019 Tomas Becks

With the release of The Death of Erin Myers, publisher/developer Viperante have kicked off their Short Story Series. This series is an anthology of five point-and-click adventure games that are supposed to be unique and standalone experiences. They tried to evoke the feeling of short stories in literature, with every game being a self-contained story exploring different ideas. While there are plenty of short adventure games, I’m not aware of any anthology series that do this, so that got my attention.

Who Was Erin Myers?

In The Death Of Erin Myers, you play titular cop Erin Myers. And you are dead. There’s nothing you can do about this, but that isn’t the goal of the game. The goal is to find out how and why she died, and hopefully understand her more at the end of the game than you do at the start. In order to achieve this, you have to play out 7 scenes and two dream sequences. Each one of these is designed to give you an insight into an important moment that lead up to Erin’s death, and shows you a piece of the puzzle. Eventually, when you’ve played all nine scenes, you know what has happened. You will know why it happened. And to say more would be spoiling it.

Simple Mechanics

This is not a difficult game, but that is also not the point. The point here is to experience the interactive equivalent of a short story, and the game is geared towards that. The puzzles are mostly inventory puzzles, logically combining things to get to whatever is needed to overcome an obstacle. This could be a locked door, a safe, or a malfunctioning sink. It all makes sense, and most locations consist of a single place, although sometimes there are two or three rooms to examine. Once you’ve finished a segment, you move on to the next. But these segments, these moments from Erin Myers’ past, are not visited in chronological order. This heightens the mystery, and makes sure you only find out what really happened once you’ve finished the story.

Raw Realism

The graphics are good. The few people you encounter are realistic like in a European comic book (or bande dessinée). The surroundings are very realistic, and it’s experienced in first-person mode. It all fits the mood that the developers are trying to get across. But what helps, and what immediately caught my attention, was the fantastic music. The score really works on your emotions and evokes dread, sadness, relief, and angst. This worked so well that in one scene I had the hairs on my arms stand up because of the eerie soundtrack. This is most certainly not a horror game, but real life can be a lot more frightening than any scary movie, and Erin goes through a lot in this short game. The music is the perfect companion for that.

The Death of Erin Myers Conclusion

Viperante set out to deliver a game that is the point-and-click version of a literary short story, and it succeeds in that. I finished the game in a little over 80 minutes, but they managed to cram a lot in that hour and a half. It has certainly got my curiosity to see what the other parts will be like. They are not tied into this story in any way, but “even though each game is standalone, all the games in the series share some common themes and mechanics. They will all explore certain dark, sometimes macabre, ideas. And they will all contain good old classic point-and-click adventure game puzzle solving.” according to Viperante on the Steam page of the game. And that is perfect in my book.

This review is based on a review copy of the game provided by Dan Peach at Viperante for coverage purposes.