Murder at the Birch Tree Theater

Murder at the Birch Tree Theater is a detective game about dramatic events taking place at a fictional community theater over the span of twenty years. Players must examine characters and items inside the theater in order to understand several deaths. The game wears its love of musicals on its sleeve, and turns the theater into a memorable stage for mysteries.

The gameplay closely follows the deduction framework established by The Case of the Golden Idol. In Explore mode, you get to observe frozen vignettes of several rooms. Bits of information are conveyed through character dialogue, written documents and other props. These elements will help you build an understanding of what lead to the deadly incident at the center of the case, and who’s responsible for it. Then, in Solve mode, you use a bank of a few dozen words to fill in the blanks in a description of the events, and validate your reasoning.

The solution sheet that must be filled in also contains intermediary steps, like matching names to portraits, that help solving each case. The difficulty gently builds up across the ten cases, with a moderately tough (and markedly original) final case to cap things off. A few cases contain audio snippets such as rehearsal recordings and phone messages; these snippets are always captioned and can be paused if needed.

Each case features a different musical as a backdrop, and the characters make up a lively cast of artists, technicians, performers and board members. The story eschews most dark crime tropes, though it does not shy away from portraying ambition, pettiness, and the occasionally twisted dynamics of a community troupe. Murder at the Birch Tree Theater bears the same passion that goes into producing musicals, but its drama is no less bitter.

This description was written by Oriane Tury.