The Inquisitor Review
Video games can be great vehicles for mysteries. The idea of gathering clues, questioning witnesses, and giving dramatic speeches where you stun an array of suspects with your intellect makes for an exciting fantasy. But lots of games stumble trying to fit the inherently open-ended, red-string-connecting fantasy of the detective into traditionally linear story structures. The Inquisitor is a game like that — it starts with the compelling concept of playing as a medieval church cop hunting a vampire, but it always puts the strings on the board for you, and thus never really lives up to the potential of its premise.
It is quite a premise, though. As inquisitor Mordimer Madderdin, you've been dispatched to investigate the citizens of a European town called Koenigstein. What's more, the story is based on the dark fantasy novels of Polish writer Jacek Piekara, imagining an alternate religious history of Christianity in which Jesus Christ wasn't a martyr, but instead broke free of his crucifixion and led a vengeful army to conquer the Roman Empire.
It feels a bit like you've stepped into Star Trek's Mirror Universe as you begin The Inquisitor, with characters describing how mercilessness, retribution, and the ends justifying the means are virtues of their religion. For a story-driven game that promises tough decisions to make in conversations and interrogations, it's an excellent setup. Lots of games will put "moral" questions to you, but I've never seen another use its worldbuilding to change the rules underlying that morality. What you consider moral in our reality may not be what characters consider moral in this one, and you might need to worry about how others will interpret your actions in ways you don't expect.
At least, that's the underlying idea of The Inquisitor, but it doesn't ever really land that feeling. The consequences of your actions shake out pretty much the way you'd expect them to whether you’re nice to people or mean to them — or at least, that's how it
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