Utter a Name

Utter a Name is a detective game about solving supernatural murders at a Victorian wedding. All the guests are dead, and you have to figure out who everyone is and who killed them. This game is a single stand-alone case, but it’s complicated and involves dozens of characters.

The format is a 2D point-and-click adventure where you play a young woman exploring a sprawling Victorian mansion. The bodies of the guests are scattered around the mansion. Next to each body is its ghost. If you talk to a ghost, you are given the opportunity to utter the ghost’s name. It will then ask who killed it, and you can enter the name of the killer. If you enter three pairs of names correctly, they all get marked correct and locked.

As in Return of the Obra Dinn (a game Utter a Name openly took inspiration from), there are portals around the mansion that allow you to open a brief window to show what was going on in the immediate vicinity at some point in the past. You can see characters and their dialogue, although people’s faces are sometimes obscured. It’s up to you to piece together what order the events happened in and how they fit together, weaving into a tale of occultism, murder, and necromancy.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.