Suspect

About

Suspect is a text-based adventure game where you play a journalist tangled in a murder mystery at a fancy Halloween party. You arrive in a cowboy costume, only to find your wealthy friend dead, a suspicious lariat nearby, and the police zeroing in on you. The challenge is sifting through clues, interrogating masked guests, and uncovering the real killer before your alibi unravels. The game leans heavily on description and deduction, with a tight focus on piecing together motives and secrets in a glittering but toxic social circle. As Infocom’s final murder mystery, Suspect wraps up a genre that defined the studio’s early success. It runs on ZIL code, ensuring compatibility across 1980s platforms from C64 to Atari ST. Players noting its sharp writing and fair puzzle design often compare it to Deadline but with tighter pacing. A 1985 survey ranked it 12th among Infocom’s 15 titles, praised for balancing complexity with accessibility. The real killer hides in plain sight, a detail fans still debate decades later.

Storyline

The player's character is a reporter for the fictitious newspaper The Washington Representative. Veronica Ashcroft-Wellman, a longtime friend and wealthy socialite, has sent an invitation to the annual Ashcroft Halloween Ball, where Maryland's high society bluebloods rub elbows, network, and congratulate each other on their fortunes. The paper's editor suggests covering the party as a story, smelling an easy article that could either praise or mock the wealthy. Since it is a costume party, the player's character suits up in a rented cowboy outfit and moseys over to the bash. Many attendees wear masks, making it difficult to initially identify them. Not long into the party, however, Veronica is found dead—strangled with a very familiar-looking lariat, with a bullet from the costume's gunbelt lying near the body for good measure. But the player stashed the rope in the closet earlier, and the bullet is missing from the back of the belt; anyone could have taken them! Nevertheless, the player is the prime suspect in Veronica's murder. A lot of snooping has to be done to identify the real killer...