LM: Isn't there an option to play the game so that you see the ending as originally told in her book?

LS: At the end of the game, once you have successfully gone through our version of it, you can experience the original ending of the book. Not the ending of the movie or the stage play, the actual ending in the book. Which has not been seen outside of the novel, to my knowledge.

LM: Really, that's great to hear.

SN: Obviously while you are playing the game, we couldn't have had all the clues pointing in two directions — they had to point in one direction.

LS: They point in ten directions!

SN: Well, yeah…

LS: He's right, though. In order to play fair, you have to actually have clues that point to the real killer. Early on we talked about, "Gee, wouldn't it be cool if the killer could change anytime you played or something." But this isn't Clue. There's a whole different thing going on here. A game like that is very open-ended and modular. This is not. Doing something like that wouldn't be paying homage to the spirit of her books. It would also be so complicated to pull off with the additional assets that it probably wouldn't have made sense.

LM: You mentioned wanting to create a sense of freedom for the player vs. perhaps a "locked room" mystery feeling. I saw the house at E3 and got the impression there is a sort of pseudo real-time feel to movements of people around the house.

LS: Yes, in games like The Last Express, gameplay was very free form and you could actually miss things. We have created the illusion that there are things going on when the player character isn't present. In fact, we guarantee that people aren't going to miss anything important.

SN: You could miss some things if you are not thorough, but you wouldn't miss anything plot essential.

LM: So not things that are necessary to complete the game?

SN: It is more like there are packets of time. It's like a play the way Lee wrote it. It's all separated into chapters. We sub-divided those chapters into acts. You will play through an act and then time will advance. Anything you didn't do in that previous act, obviously you wouldn't be able to go back and get. But anything missed isn't game ending. There isn't anything game essential that you can miss.

LM: There are eleven characters in your version. The playable character is Patrick Narracott, the boatman. What can you tell us about the other characters in the game?

LS: The other characters? We have... can I do them in alphabetical order? Probably not. Let's see, we have Philip Lombard, who is an adventurer. He is dashing, roguish and probably not as nice as he should be. They all have their secrets too. The same as in all the other versions, and the new eleventh character does as well. We've got Vera Claythorne, who was a governess and is now coming to the island to be the secretary. She is the young ingénue. Emily Brent is this bible thumping, very rigid kind of middle-aged woman. There is this dotty old General, John Mackenzie. Then there's Justice Wargraves, who is a retired judge. We've got Doctor Armstrong who has been nipping at the bottle a little bit. Tony Marston is a young playboy. He is the golden child of a wealthy upper-class family. There are the two servants, a man and his wife, named Thomas and Ethel Rogers. They are as proper as English servants were supposed to be. They are a little upset about the situation, but they don't voice that very often. You have a private detective named William Blore, who has been hired to look after the Lady of the house's jewels. They all think they are there for one reason, but they have all been gathered there for another reason. They are all being manipulated. I think that is all of them?

SN: Yes, you got them all.

LM: These characters, they have their own backstory?

LS: Yes, and because of one of the game innovations, the amount of backstory you learn is entirely up to you. We have a couple of things that we are doing. One is based on something I hate in adventure games. Which is where you walk into a private room with the occupant standing there and immediately start rifling through their drawers and all their stuff. And they don't say anything. That drives me crazy. So there are negative consequences if you get caught doing something that any one of the NPCs thinks you shouldn't be doing. We measure that with something we are calling the "Suspicion Meter". Now this is not part of the interface; it's something we are doing behind the scenes. It's a very simple meter; it only has three positions. You start off in neutral with each of the other characters. If you do things that they don't like, it falls to a negative one. If you do things they like, it moves up. So there is never more than two spaces you can move the internal game meter for that character in either direction. The dialogues shift automatically, depending upon what your relationship with the NPC is at that time. If you are in a negative position with the characters, you will learn less than you would if you had been a little smarter in your investigation. But there are always ways to get back on the good side of somebody. They each have their own little foibles or likes and dislikes, which you can play on to get on their good side. But you can't really do your typical adventure game stuff, like opening and poking into everything, yelling at everybody, without consequences.

SN: It's like an RPG with side quests. One of your objectives, although not an essential one, is to get in as many characters' good graces as you can.

LS: Actually, it helps solve the mystery, too.

SN: Yeah, that's true. Obviously the more background you have about the characters, the more likely you are to figure out the killer.

LM: Does any of this affect the ending at all?

LS: The ending does have several possibilities. I am not sure what all the permutations are. I don't want to go into too much detail here. But you do have the opportunity to rescue some people. And depending upon who you manage to rescue or if you don't care and let them all die, that affects the ending. A couple of your other actions or at least one of your other actions I know of, has the player influence a "little joke" at the end as well. There are a number of different possibilities that can happen and I think probably the scene with the most variations is the last one back in Sticklehaven.

LM: Which game location is Sticklehaven?

LS: It's the seaside town where I begin the game. As far as I know, none of the other adaptations have started the story there, although that is where the book begins. I start with the people in transit. So we get to introduce each character; we set up some of the mysteries pretty fast. That is sort of the opening cutscene.



LM: What can you tell us about this town and the other locations in the game?

LS: Sticklehaven is a little fishing village. There is a lot of stuff going on and then they embark on a boat and travel to "Shipwreck Island", where the house is located.

LM: Does the house have a history?

LS: Christie, in two or three sentences, listed rumors surrounding a few of the people who lived there before this mysterious Mr. Owen bought it. I took each one of those and treated them as an actual fact. There was a story that the island was at one time a secret military base. Then there was a yachtsman and his wife, who didn't like water. A famous actress once lived in the house, which explains why we have a screening room. Because of the island's history, there is a deserted fishing village there. It's a tiny little place; just a few houses. Some other things that we added were as a result of this history. And then there were also a lot of shipwrecks and pirates along that coast.

SN: The house is styled after the Frank Lloyd Wright house, "Falling Water".

LS: One of the things that I noticed as I was reading the book again carefully for descriptions, is that all the other adaptations had this sort of spooky old mansion look to the house. When in actual fact, she described the house as very modern and stark looking. And modern and stark in the 1930s was Frank Lloyd Wright, so my first inclination was to go in that direction. Of course we didn't do it exactly, but it's that same style of architecture and I think you can recognize it.

LM: I noticed that you have sailor boys instead of the classic little Indians. What was the reason for this change?

LS: There was some political correctness involved. The first version of the novel, published in England, was the least politically correct of all. That was changed to Ten Little Indians, meaning from India. And the figurines at the table were Indians. Then that became politically incorrect, so in the new publication of the novel, the Indians became ten little soldier boys. That didn't really work for me, because we're on an island. We have boats and everything else, so I asked if I could change the soldiers to sailor boys and again Chorion was willing to go along with it. There is one screenshot I have seen that shows the figurines on the table. Those are representative of the "Jack Tar" British sailor boy look.