Jenny Lee was only seventeen years old when she was brutally murdered, beaten to death with her own saxophone.  Now, seventeen years later, you have been sent into the past to investigate her murder.  A disembodied voice follows you everywhere you go, sometimes offering up hints but sometimes reprimanding you if you find clues to a solution that the voice doesn’t want to hear.  The voice makes it clear that you have a limited amount of time to solve the murder and when that time expires, so will you.  When you’re not investigating, you’re in limbo, where you can move in every direction but you can never escape.  Or can you?

This work of Interactive Fiction is actually two mysteries in one.  The first is the mystery of who murdered Jenny Lee.  The other is the mystery of who you are and why you’ve been sent to the past.  Neither is an easy mystery to solve and, fortunately, the game does have a walk-through for those who just want to find out what’s going on in the most straight-forward way possible.  However, it’s best to play this game without using the walk-through so that you can fully immerse yourself in the world that it creates.  Not everything you see in the game is going to be relevant to solving the mystery.  Like all good detective stories, there are red herrings.

The best advice I can give you for what to do while playing The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee is to write things down.  A lot of the game’s clues involve remembering either directions or passcodes.  Making the right or wrong decision when going either north, south, east, or west be can be the difference between a good ending and a bad ending.

The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee is an entry in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition.  It, and all of the other entries, can be played here.