· 3 min read
Keep the clue, leave the guess
Game journals can keep clues within reach without taking the work of connecting them away from the player.
Open the book in Return of the Obra Dinn. The manifest gives you the crew's names, and portraits turn that list into faces. Death scenes leave details to compare. If one slips your mind, the book is where you go to find it again. Then the match is yours.
Lucas Pope writes that he tried a shorter logbook and a timeline before choosing a story-like book. He wanted one place to organize the information gathered during the investigation. Choosing a book also makes it simple to return to an old detail when it starts to matter again.
The line that gets ahead of you#
Imagine a witness saying, “I heard a bell after midnight.” You walk to the church tower and find no bell. From the street below, the last tram rings as it rounds a corner. The witness's words now point somewhere new. A journal that rewrites them as “The church bell rang at midnight” has closed the question before the player gets to make that connection—or reject it.
Keep the witness's sentence and where you heard it. An adventure game can still point the player toward the tower. Mark it as a lead so it doesn't read like a settled fact. If the game confirms a connection later, show what new evidence changed its status.
The player can forget a name and find it again, then change their mind about the clue. The game keeps the original detail ready to inspect while the theory moves around it.
Leave a margin#
A player should not need a spreadsheet outside the game to keep the case straight. Search can do the boring part: look up a name or a place and return to the line where it came from. A pinned lead or a scrap of player-written text can hold a suspicion. Some people will keep paper notes because they like to. The in-game journal still needs to make its clues easy to find again.
When you test a journal, ask someone to point to the line that supports their current theory. If they cannot find it, make the clue easier to retrieve. When the journal states more than the evidence supports, soften the wording. Let the player return to the witness's sentence. Leave the guess in pencil.