MYSTERY ON THE STARSHIP CRUSADER

Space adventure meets murder mystery meets video game meets puzzler.

After the reader chooses “yes” in answer to the question “Do you want to play Pemberton’s game?” the second-person protagonist is pulled into a book and wakes as a video game lizard named Dr. Iz. (Choosing “no” lands them on the final page of an Amish romance called The Cheesemaker’s Daughter.) Most people on the titular spaceship, apparently, are other players in the game. One of them, they all learn, is a traitor, and the first successful detective will receive $1 million. It’ll be tricky for the constantly bickering players to work together, though. The stereotyped player characters come from a range of backgrounds: the mom who hates video games, the teenage girl constantly poking at a phone, the condescending professional gamer, the 6-year-old (whose dialogue would better match someone older). Male players are all male aliens in-game, female players’ characters appear as human females illustrated with a variety of skin colors, and the second-person protagonist is male. The mystery is a branching narrative with story choices and puzzles to solve, but most choices lack interesting consequences. Many simply lead the protagonist into another room where he’s able to see a clue before the story branches rejoin, seemingly without consequence. In the climactic reveal, however, long after those apparently arbitrary choices, a summation of a solved mystery involves clues that were only revealed in some of the possible forks. Puzzles are mostly simple spot-the-differences brainteasers while a more complex puzzle does not work, presenting myriad functional answers.

Some well-paced geeky humor is marred by broken or dull puzzles and inconsequential story choices.