Answers provided with the launch of Who Summoned It? 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Demo also available for slideshow-styled deduction mystery in a magical fantasy kingdom

Figuring out whodunit in any mystery is challenging enough, but add magic and fantastical creatures to the mix and you'll have to determine Who Summoned It? instead, like in the newly released deduction adventure from the indie husband-and-wife team at Crooked Foot. 

Things in the Kingdom of Knotgud are... well, not good. The royal marriage festival has gone disastrously wrong, the newly coronated king lies buried in the castle ruins, and now the son of a neighbouring land is missing while a shadowy, "terrible creature known as the Booglo ... torments the land." The Mountain King, Cloud Queen, Vampire Queen, and Sea King are concerned the trouble will spread to their dominions next, so they call upon the best and brightest detective from an "elite society of hard-boiled truth seekers" called the "truthmeisters" to investigate. Quite unexpectedly, what they get is Riki Rocktoe, a lovable, entirely soft-boiled little creature with immense "huggability." Not exactly the kind of grizzled veteran they were looking for, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And so Riki heads off to "explore the town of Knotgud, interrogate townsfolk, and use magical items" in order to piece together what happened and who is behind it all. 

This game is the latest in a line of deduction games that combine light point-and-click, first-person adventuring with Golden Idol-inspired, fill-in-the-blank-style mystery solving. Who Summoned It? is presented in a bright and colourful hand-painted cartoon art style, but just like its cheerful protagonist, don't let its cuteness fool you. There's a real crisis afoot and smaller mysteries like a stolen painting to solve as well, and they're all dependent on you to correctly fit the clues together. Helping you are a number of magical tools at your disposal, allowing you to "look into the past with a cracked crystal ball, get into tiny spaces with all-purpose-rats, [and] smell the different colors of magic with an enchanted cat."

The most important magical item you have, however, is your "Scroll of Truth, which only allows true statements to be written on it." As you progress through town, you'll examine your surroundings for clues and converse with the cast of more than twenty different persons of interest – some human, some not, such as the turnip-loving farmer Herbert and the rat-peddling stall keeper Rita. Along the way you will collect context-specific highlighted phrases from observation and dialogue bubbles to add to the more generic words you already know, and then draw from them all to solve fragmented statements on your scroll. There is no penalty for making false statements, but as the scroll knows best, only the correct ones will allow you to advance.

You can start forming theories right away, as Who Summoned It? has launched on Steam for Windows PC. Or you can sample it first through the playable demo also available to download.

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