No doubt over the past two years some of us will have had to ensure a Zoom based quiz with family members but I bet you haven’t had to solve a murder at the same time. Welcome to Who Pressed mute on Uncle Marcus.
You play as Abby, who discovers that after a family meeting she misses her Uncle Marcus (played by Jurassic World’s Andy Buckley) is poisoned in an attempted murder, and he is relying on her to find out who did it.
While taking part in the quiz, Abby needs to subtly interrogate the various family members and work out who pressed mute on Uncle Marcus. The weird thing about the investigation is that Uncle Marcus isn’t dead yet and so you’ll interact with him throughout the playthrough.
The excellent cast does a great job of being a typical family. There are lots of passive (and not so passive) aggressive put-downs and insults between older members of the family with disgust and disinterest from the younger siblings. There are lots of cringeworthy moments that did make me laugh and at times it was easy to see representations of my own family at times!
As you take part in the quiz you’ll be prompted to make choices, this could something as simple as answering the actual quiz question or probing a family member about their opinions of Marcus, key moments are saved in an evidence menu for you, these can be kept for subsequent playthroughs or if you want to up the challenge you can start afresh each game. As you reach the end of each quiz you’ll be prompted to accuse someone of poisoning Marcus, but you can only accuse the people you have evidence against, so there will be multiple playthroughs of the game required.
This is where the frustration kicks in for me. There are certain parts of the game where you can skip sections you have already seen, but not all of them which means having to rewatch big chunks of the game over and over again. If you make a wrong choice you’ll find yourself having to quickly quit the game and restart a section. After each round a helpful screen appears telling you how much you have managed to find out from each member of the family so you can plan your responses to squeeze out the extra info you need.
Ironically, when you do discover the guilty party it’s a bit of a let down. In fact some of the non-guilty members produced more shocking endings to the game. My playthorugh ended up with me knowing who did it but I struggled to get the evidence I needed!
There are some excellent customisation options in the settings to make the game accessible for everybody and I was glad to see a streamer mode that pauses the game at each choice, it’s a good idea to turn that on during subsequent playthroughs of the game so that you don’t accidentally make the wrong choices.
If you are a fan of the FMV’s Wales Interactive release you’ll probably enjoy this too, it certainly wasn’t my favourite but the completionist in me must have done because I did everything possible to find the killer!
