The Deed is a puzzle game in where you are tasked with murdering your sister and finding evidence to incriminate one of the house’s other residents. You are a disowned son of a wealthy family and you take the opportunity of your arriving to your father’s 50th birthday in order to be allowed into the mansion again. As you can tell right off the bat this is a rather grim and serious title with pretty much no humor to be found. The atmosphere of this 1945 era mansion is pretty eerie but in this case you are the monster which is a cool twist to most games. You are given various dialogue choices throughout the game leaving it up to you whether to be a jerk or a seemingly calm, well-mannered person. Be careful though, your choices do have consequences and remember that you are here to pull off a murder so even being too nice is suspicious. Upon entering the house you are able to explore your surroundings and chat with its inhabitants in order to better understand the situation of the house and the tensions between people.
Exploring the mansion you will find lots of objects that can be potentially used to murder your sister with like shotguns, glass shards and rope as well as potential evidence like panties or diaries. This is where one of the game’s more annoying aspects come into play. Whatever you do don’t collect two items as that will automatically teleport you to dinner even if you still need people to talk to or are not ready. This game is separated into three phases, first is the exploration phase afterwards it is the planting evidence and finally the investigation phase. Most of your time will be spent in the exploration phase as that is where you need to figure out the best methods of murder with a two item limit as well as meeting everyone in the house. Everything you do in this phase will have an effect later on even the seemingly meaningless things like what rooms you entered and who you talked to. There is just so much chances to manipulate the situation that is about to occur that you can’t help but thinking about all the little flaws that could potentially come back to haunt you, making it a pretty intense and thoughtful experience.
The second phase is by far the shortest and has you planting your chosen evidence somewhere in the mansion and then murdering your sister afterwards. The final phase has a very observant detective observe the crime scene and you must outsmart him during his interview session with you. All three of these phases combined should take you about 10 to 20 minutes to complete depending on how thoroughly you think things through making this a very short game. The replayability is very high however, since the possibilities of how to evade this murder and gain your inheritance are quite numerous. After completing the game you just can’t help but wonder what would have happened if you did things differently or framed someone else that before you know it you are scheming up another plan and restarting the game. It’s not randomly generated so it does have a limit to its replayablity since nothing will change if you pick the same options but where the preset items are placed lends to making this house feel lived in and real so random generation may have done more harm than good.
Despite this being a mansion it is really small in game featuring nothing more than a basement and a second story that can very quickly be explored. One small nitpick I have is how far away you are from the doors when entering though that is such a minor detail that you’ll stop noticing it in no time. One not so small nitpick is that this game is heavily letter-boxed and most of your screen will be nothing but black while the game itself only takes up a small space in the middle. Some option to stretch to full screen would have been appreciated. Moving on from the technical side of things, your family are all terrible people which is unfortunate since it would have been rather interesting having to murder someone that did you no harm, making you feel like more of a monster. There is no blood or anything of the sort here, when you murder her it just goes to a black screen and a short scream plays out. This is a pretty dark game no doubt and one that really gets you thinking pretty hard on the best way to murder someone which is pretty creepy in itself actually. The Deed was definitely a unique and memorable experience that I’m glad I stumbled upon and at a price point of less than a dollar it is one game I’d recommend to anyone that has the slightest interest in it.
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