I’m at a bustling house party when I notice another guest standing completely still in a corner, not engaging with the crowd. I do what everyone does in a situation like this: I walk up behind them, point a revolver at the back of their head from a distance of roughly one millimeter, and pull the trigger.
What happens next is what often happens in a situation like this: the guest, who has been standing completely motionless for at least 15 seconds, chooses that precise moment to move. I miss the easiest shot in history as my target suddenly jukes to the right and runs out of the room.
I’ve committed a major party faux-pas: I’ve just exposed myself as an assassin in Killer Inn, the multiplayer social deduction action game from Tactic Studios and Square Enix. Inside a sprawling mansion, 24 people are assigned the role of “lamb” or “wolf.” The goal of the lambs is to escape. The goal of the wolves is to kill them.
Killer Party
If you’ve played any of the parade of murder party games and mods that have sprung to life over the past couple decades (Mafia, Werewolf, The Ship, Among Us, Trouble in Terrorist Town), you get the idea. Killer Inn angles more to the action side of things. I suppose you don’t need to be great at third-person shooters to win, but all the matches I played were ultimately decided with frantic gunfights and melee brawls, so it definitely helps.
I was a lamb for my first two matches, which is my preferred way to play: when you’re a wolf you can see who is who among the guests, but when you’re a lamb, anyone could be out to get you—the scruffy handyman, the wealthy CEO, the guy dressed like a pirate, the gamer who carries around a huge mechanical keyboard in her backpack like all gamers do—and that giddy paranoia is the best part of games like this.
The mansion is filled with items hidden in drawers and chests for players to scrabble around and find: guns, knives, health packs, stamina pills, explosive traps, and useful items like crowbars that let you pry open crates to find even more loot. The initial battle royale gearing-up phase of the game never lasts long because, gasp: someone’s been murdered! Everyone rushes over to examine the stiff.
A fresh corpse will contain clues: a scrap of the killer’s clothing, a hair from their head, a fingerprint that can be examined with a microscope at a work bench. Wolves can sometimes conceal their tracks (there are cleaning supplies that hide evidence) but each kill is bound to give away something. As the corpses pile up, lambs can piece together the identity of the party’s killers: someone with a blue shirt and red hair, for example, or in the case of a fingerprint, a specific identity.
Lambs aren’t helpless, either: they can use all the same weapons as the wolves and start killing them right back. There are NPCs scattered throughout the hotel in safe zones that function as item shops and offer puzzles that can be solved to earn money or unlock chests. The danger, à la Among Us, is the time it takes to focus on a puzzle while your back is turned on everything else.
As a lamb I discovered a slightly safer way to get what I wanted: pickpocketing. When players interacted with NPCs or examined corpses, I’d drop into a crouch behind them and root through their pockets with a little theft minigame. I stripped armor, guns, and grenades off several players that way. (It does require that no one get suspicious of a man dressed like a pirate crouching behind them for 5-10 seconds, tough in a game where everyone is trying to kill each other.)
The backstory of this murder party is a little unclear to me: I get the concept of a rich eccentric inviting a bunch of people to their sprawling mansion and forcing them to play bloodsports, but there are a few weird details. The only way lambs can escape the island (apart from eliminating all the wolves) is to defeat a quartet of overpowered hovering golden orbs called guardians that each contain a key that unlocks a gate leading to an old-timey schooner that can be sailed to safety.
Don’t bother reading that again, it won’t make any more sense. Further confusing me is the punishment meted out if one lamb kills another lamb. Can you guess what happens? Go on, guess. They turn to stone. If you’re a lamb and kill one of your own, you instantly transform into a stone statue. Is that what you guessed?
Though I prefer being a lamb, I did much better as a wolf in the final game. I solved a couple puzzles to acquire guns, I followed a couple lambs until they were isolated, then brutally murdered them before pretending to examine their corpses when everyone else arrived. I wasn’t too concerned with hiding my identity after a while: there were a bunch of wolves left toward the end of the match and we just ran around (in a pack, you might say) killing off the rest of the scattered lambs like it was any old team deathmatch.
Killer Inn is facing the same challenge these kinds of games always have: they work infinitely better with people you know than random strangers, and for those of us who don’t have 23 friends, it can be tricky finding groups who will work together and embrace the spirit of the game instead of just running around shooting everyone willy-nilly.
But there’s the potential here for the best kind of goofy fun that only murder party games can provide: the creeping paranoia, the loud group accusation sessions, and the hilarity of a mad scramble when the opportunity for a clean hit turns into a messy fiasco.
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