During Lockdown, Murder 57 Ltd produced an online murder mystery adventure set in the 1920’s, called A Fashionable Way To Die.
Synopsis:
It is July 1921 and Florence Tremaine, widow and owner of Tremaine Fabrics, one of the top fabric manufacturers in Europe, is hosting a small party to thank her staff and customers. The event will be held at her home Barkston Manor and promises to be a lavish affair. Florence however, is unaware that her world is about to come crashing down! With a mixture of secrecy, financial impropriety and murder, the Tremaine company is thrown into turmoil from which it may never recover.
Present at the party were :
Florence Tremaine
Horatio Tremaine
Arabella Tremaine
Mary Williams
Tobias Moore
Just as the party was about to get underway, a body was discovered near the entrance to Barkston Manor ! Now the Inspector needed assistance to investigate this suspicious death……
Review:
A group of City Adventurers immediately signed up to assist the Inspector. The first day we had a short video to watch that introduced the characters and the plot. Having been to a number of Murder 57 events, we were expecting the videos to show the cast acting out the story. Instead the videos had cut-outs for each character against a variety of background. this was a little off-putting at first, I suppose because we were used to the acted out mysteries by other companies. Also the first video was very short (less than 10 minutes) so we didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of the mystery.
However, by the time we watched the second and third videos, we were used to the set up. Each character is played by a different actor, so it is like listening to a radio play. The visual elements are not used for the actors but are used to distribute the evidence. Rather like the physical evidence boards used at Murder 57 evenings, the evidence was presented in chunks and made available to the investigators before being put to the suspects.
The plot was good, with twists and turns and hidden agendas. There was even (spoiler alert) an additional death……We made lots of notes while watching the next videos, that were each around 20 minutes long and contained a lot of information. Then we reviewed some of the evidence to check we hadn’t missed anything vital.
As with other murder mysteries, we came up with who we believed to be the murderer. We sent off an email with the name, the evidence and the motive. And we were right!
If you want to give it a go, visit Murder 57 Ltd
