The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is way better than it needed to be
Imagine if they murdered Mario.
Really, try to imagine it. Can you? I mean it: Can you, really? Does that seem like a thing that could move through Nintendo, greenlit by each and every requisite department across its complex, multinational corporate structure? And does that seem like something that could not only get greenlit, but then actually produced, marketed, and shipped? And released for free?
Because that’s what Sega did with The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.
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It would be very easy to be cynical about The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog on both a critical and creative front. It would be tempting to take the view that what we have here is a glorified infomercial, meant simply to capture our accumulated attention on social media and galvanize that attention into positive brand recognition. Such a view would be warranted if the game were equally cynical in its construction: a rushed and ill-conceived meme of a game, created without love and with only the reinforcement of IP in mind. But both postures are only conceivable before actually playing The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, which is far better and far more generous than it needed to be.
The premise of the game is straightforward: Amy Rose is throwing herself a birthday bash, and being a fan of true crime podcasts, she’s decided to book a
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