When did detectives become a stereotype? The Last Case of John Morley features a 40s detective, so I was wholly unsurprised to learn that he works in an untidy, cramped office and has a secretary that practically dresses him. To the game’s credit, though, I don’t remember it setting up that John has a drinking problem. At no point did he slump over a desk, drunk on whiskey, with an overflowing ashtray on the desk next to him. So it has that going for it.
In truth, The Last Case of John Morley uses clichés quite liberally, but works to transform itself within them. It doesn’t include a cliché without explaining how it fits into the narrative. Which is good. Clichés are there for a reason. They’re essentially a shortcut to audience investment. The only major drawback to this is that The Last Case of John Morley really struggles to marry its narrative together with its status as a video game.
Following The Breadcrumbs
The Last Case of John Morley opens with the titular Morley in hospital, having fallen off a roof in his last case. After stitching himself back together, and grabbing his neatly pressed clothes, he heads to his office. There he meets Lady Margaret Fordside, who tasks him with his ‘last case’: finding who killed her daughter. Morley sets off to chase down the culprit, starting off at Blomsbury house before picking his way through sanitoriums and hospitals as he learns how mentally fragile the killer truly is. It’s a serviceable frame for the story.
With those locations, you’d expect The Last Case of John Morley to be a horror game. While I’d be hesitant to call it that with certainty, there’s no denying that it’s dripping with atmosphere. When you enter the big house at the start, you’re surrounded by weird creaking noises and all you’ve got to see by is a flickering lantern. You really get the sense that there could be monsters in every shadow. It builds the tension very well, and only occasionally washes it away with jumpscares.
A Puzzling Crime
Unfortunately, while the atmosphere is top shelf, it struggles to pair it together with the gameplay. It’s ostensibly a puzzle game, but the vast majority of the gameplay is just tapping on interactable elements and listening to John monologue. There are a couple of interesting puzzles, like rotating statues according to a book, but it relies far too heavily on code-locked doors. It also has a bad habit of just appending codes on the bottom of random notes. An otherwise innocuous note just ends with a door code for absolutely no reason. We don’t even do any detecting. John does it all for us.
This element of The Last Case of John Morley smacks of a game that had the beginning and end of its story cemented long before any ‘video game’ considerations came into play. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we weren’t hiding in lockers or getting into chase scenes. We can’t actually die. But it needs something to bring it alive. As it is, the story was essentially a three hour long monologue. The story was interesting, don’t get me wrong, even if the ending does lean into cliché a touch (though it labours hard to explain itself). Without spoiling things, the fact that one of the locations is a sanitorium should clue you in.
The Last Case of John Morley – Hands-off Horror
The result is that I wasn’t that invested in John Morley as a character. He had some promising notes at the start, but the middle of the game is just him wandering around, commenting on clues. Without the investment, the final twist falls a little flat. Still, The Last Case of John Morley does have some good production value. Characters and environments actually look pretty good, which is refreshing, and the sound design is top notch. Even if it does love its musical stings. Voice acting is a bit wobbly, but not too bad.
My final feeling is that this a game that had a nice beginning, and a potentially good ending, but it couldn’t think of what to do with its middle. Pushing the puzzles more could let us get into Morley’s head. Come to think on it, Morley himself didn’t help. He reacts to the possibility that the killer could be in the house with him with mild annoyance, for instance. There’s a sense of oddness, which might be deliberate. Still, the ending was set up as though it was going to bowl me over, but the hands-off gameplay and lack of character development made it roll right past me.
