Line #56 VideoGame/WhoPressedMuteOnUncleMarcus


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3	''Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?'' is an FMV Mystery Game developed by Wales Studios and released on March 18, 2022.
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5	You play as Abby, a young woman with experience in investigation. She receives a disturbing video call from her uncle, Marcus, claiming that he has been poisoned by one of the other family during their last family gathering and is hours away from dying. He asks for Abby's help by having her enter her family's virtual quiz night and have her find the poison that was used, evidence for why a family member would poison Marcus, and of course, the culprit themselves.
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7	The game has multiple endings, and the series of events are short, so the player is encouraged to play multiple times in order to find all that there is to find.
8	----
9	!!This game provides examples of:
10	* AbusiveParents:
11	** Abby's mother Felicity is emotionally manipulative, completely dismissing the accomplishments of her own offspring that don't match her own desires and unwilling to converse unless she's constantly being flattered. In the Golden Ending, Abby can call her out for only wanting a child to have someone she's always better then.
12	** Aunt June, due to her constant inebriation, openly complains about every single thing she hates about the rest of the family, including her own sons Bradley and Toby.
13	* AccidentalMurder: The ending where you accuse [[spoiler:Bradley. He puts a gun to his head, professing his innocence but still wanting to kill himself to avoid going to jail for possessing illegal poisons, but Abby talks him down...only for his mother to burst into the room to try to stop him, and Bradley accidentally shooting her in shock. He then panics and jumps out of his bedroom window...on the third floor of the house]].
14	* AffablyEvil: The true culprit of poisoning. [[spoiler:Nan is by far the most outwardly nice to Abby and the other family members. But if Marcus survives, then after you accuse her of murder, she still remains fairly friendly (if not a little worried about the future of herself and her descendants).]]
15	* AntiFrustrationFeatures: The game retains any evidence you find from your previous playthroughs, on top of that the game allows you to skip cutscenes already see, saving you the aggravation of playing through certain parts of the story over and over. [[TrialAndErrorGameplay Which you will do.... a lot.]]
16	* ArtisticLicenseBiology: The three poisons are all real and have been used in murders, but none would result in a progression of symptoms from relatively stable to being on death's door over a mere half hour or so.
17	* ArtisticLicenseChemistry:
18	** Uncle Marcus' has several of the symptoms of being poisoned [[spoiler:by means of thallium]], but he lacks hair loss.
19	** Hallucinations are not a symptom (although in the ending where he lives and [[spoiler:Bradley accidentally kills June]], Uncle Marcus suggests the medicine is making him hallucinate).
20	* ArtisticLicenseMedicine: A single-dose cure doesn't really exist for any of the three poisons. It's also hard to believe that Uncle Marcus' doctors would be okay with him leaving hospital and going home without any medical supervision whatsoever.
21	* BadInfluencer: Lottie is an Instagram celebrity and utterly self-obsessed, with her quiz questions being entierly about herself and her social media profile. She's also, you discover, been meeting with suspicious figures. [[spoiler: She's just a drug dealer, though, and not the killer.]]
22	* BeneathSuspicion: The path to the GoldenEnding has a moment of this. [[spoiler:After learning about Bradley's poison collection from either Lottie or Toby, Abby can interrogate Bradley over who knew he kept poisons. He notes that he bragged about his collection to Lottie, that Toby would've had access to his stuff...and then he pauses, gasps "it couldn't be", and adds that Nan was snooping in his room the morning the poisons went missing.]]
23	* BigScrewedUpFamily: Quite literally everyone in the family, aside from Abby, is some degree of awful. [[spoiler:Aside from Nan's attempt on Marcus's life and successful murder of her husband, each member of the family have their own secrets that are uncovered with each of their respective accusations. Felicity is an uncaring mother and have put her reputation and image before the happiness of her daughters. June is an example of what staying in the toxic environment of the family would do to someone, it's very clear that she is just a tired and hollow shell of a woman, trying to drink away her depression. Toby is revealed to actually have been living out of a van in London, and not in Africa due to a greedy investment that went south. Bradley does some pretty disturbing and dangerous things, with the fact he has access to illegal poisons just the tip of the iceberg. Lottie confesses that along with her career as a social media influencer, she is also selling cocaine on the side. Even Uncle Marcus is revealed to have had bouts of paranoia a couple years prior.]]
24	* ABirthdayNotABreak: The events of the story take place on family quiz night, which is also the birthday of Felicity.
25	* BittersweetEnding: Any ending where you save Uncle Marcus but are unable to find the true culprit. And then the ending where you do find the true culprit, but failed to save Marcus.
26	* CardCarryingJerkass: In contrast to the other character's holier-then-thou attitudes, June makes no efforts to hide her utter hatred for her family, at one point gloating about the uncomfortable silence she left in her wake.
27	* ChekhovsGun: The repeated story about June "accidentally" setting Marcus on fire comes up a lot, and doesn't seem to have any real relevance beyond showing how dysfunctional the family is [[spoiler: until it's revealed the burn dressings were poisoned.]]
28	* DarkSecret: [[spoiler: Lottie's selling drugs, Toby's embezzled thousands and is planning on faking his own death, Bradley's been buying illegal poisons on the dark web, and Nan is a murderer. Ironically the most openly reprehensible family members, Felicity and June, actually ''[[AtLeastIAdmitIt don't]]'' [[AtLeastIAdmitIt have any dark secrets of note. ]]]]
29	* ADeadlyAffair: [[spoiler:Nan had killed her husband, Eddie, because he was planning on leaving her to be with his mistress, cutting Nan and his children out of the family business and fortune in the process.]]
30	* ExtremelyShortTimespan: The game takes place in real time over the course of an evening.
31	* EveryoneCallsHerBarkeep: We never learn Nan's actual name -- she's just Nan.
32	* EveryoneIsASuspect: It soon becomes clear that ''everyone'' had something suspicious going on during the meeting.
33	* FakeStatic: An internet variant -- Toby repeatedly pretends that his sound is cutting out to avoid conversations he doesn't like.
34	* FreudianExcuse: June is the most openly unpleasant of the family by some margin, viciously insulting everyone at every opportunity, but if you manage to get her to open up? Abby can learn her alcoholism and subsequent decline is an attempt to soothe the grief of her father's death, and she fears being sober because then she'll remember what she lost. Felicity can give a shorter but similar statement, offhandedly noting that since her father died, she always wants to cry.
35	* GranolaGuy: Toby is a particularly mean-spirited version, being a self-absorbed misery tourist who speaks entirely in incomprehensible metaphors about the universe even before you learn he [[spoiler: embezzled charity money meant for building schools to invest in a slave-owning diamond mine]].
36	* HeroicBastard: [[spoiler:Uncle Marcus is the result of his father, Eddie, cheating on Nan with another woman. Nan uses this in the best ending to partly explain how she worked up the nerve to try and murder Marcus.]]
37	* HiddenInPlainSight: [[spoiler:The owl statue in the background of Nan's room, with a base slightly obscured by a book positioned in front of it, turns out to have been a murder weapon that still has discoloration from blood on said base. Nan actually seems bemused that nobody ever noticed before in the ending where she's accused.]]
38	* HollywoodHealing: If Marcus is told to take the wrong antidote while on his deathbed, he'll expire immediately after ingesting it. If given the correct antidote, however, he'll still be in bed but the meter indicating his condition immediately starts moving back towards "healthy".
39	* {{Hypocrite}}: Toby's life revolves around charitable causes (well, mainly how he can seem like a better person for supporting them), and he uses his round of the quiz to guilt-trip his relatives into caring more about global crises like climate change and supporting third-world countries. He also [[spoiler:invested all of his money in a diamond mine that was shut down by Amnesty International for exploiting slave labor]].
40	* ImpliedDeathThreat: [[spoiler: Nan ominously tells you that it might be better for Abby if she leaves the call and goes to bed early, which takes on a very different tone with the reveal she's the killer. More blatantly, if Abby accuses her without evidence, Nan calls her "a stupid girl" and warns her that "she knows what happens next". The implication is clear.]]
41	* ImproperlyParanoid: Halfway through, you learn this isn't the first time that Marcus has become convinced that someone is trying to kill him, and previous times have turned out to be nothing. Abby can dismiss the entire "murder attempt" as just another burst of baseless paranoia and stop the investigation. [[spoiler: [[SubvertedTrope She's wrong]]. This time, someone really ''[[ProperlyParanoid is]]'' trying to kill him, and the scene cuts to his funeral]
42	* ITakeOffenseToThatLastOne: When June calls Lottie a "brainless, stuck-up little moron" towards the start of Toby's quiz round, Lottie objects to being called stuck-up.
43	* ItsAllAboutMe: It would be easier to list the characters who ''aren't'' entirely self-obsessed, although Felicity certainly takes the cake: [[spoiler: when she believes her daughter has developed psychosis, she says that she promised not to put herself through a loved-one's illness and to call back when she's better.]]
44	* {{Jerkass}}: All of the family, besides Abby, in one way or another. Felicity's a raging egoist incapable of caring about anyone but herself, Toby's a holier-then-though SoapboxSadie who's constantly dismissing others, Lottie's a shallow and self-obsessed [[BadInfluencer social media celebrity]], Bradley's a deeply creepy murder-obsessed weirdo, and June is a bitter drunk who openly hates everyone. Even Marcus is a hate-filled paranoiac. Nan is at least better at hiding it, but it soon becomes clear she's just as messed up as the rest of them.
45	* LifeMeter: Used to track the declining health of the poisoned Uncle Marcus. It even increases when you correctly give him the proper antidote and it starts working.
46	* MagicAntidote: If you give Marcus the right antidote, he goes from "delirious and dying in intensive care" to "tired but basically fine " in a matter of seconds. He ''does'' at least give an offhand mention that doctors say he'll have some lingering symptoms for a few weeks, but it's still a jarringly quick recovery from near death.
47	* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: [[spoiler:Nan murdered her adulterous husband Eddie, threw his body in his favorite fishing lake, and told her children that he had committed suicide. Marcus trying to uncover the truth while writing an autobiography, which would ruin the entire family's lives if the truth got out, is what motivates Nan to try killing him too.]]
48	* MoodWhiplash: The ending with the AccidentalMurder is intercut with Toby asking everyone what he's missed and where his relatives disappeared to due to his connection sputtering. [[spoiler:If Marcus is alive, he also jokes that he might still be suffering from the poison, as he just hallucinated hearing June and Bradley dying.]]
49	* MotiveRant: The killer gets one if you successfully find them, [[spoiler: with Nan ranting about how she had to kill her husband to keep the money for her children, and had to kill Marcus to stop him finding out about it. She'll remain adamant that she only did what was best for the family.]]
50	* MultipleEndings: The game can conclude a few different ways, depending on whose dark secrets are revealed and whether or not Uncle Marcus is told the correct antidote in time.
51	* NeverTheObviousSuspect: [[spoiler: June is a spiteful, vicious bully who intensely hates Marcus, repeatedly talked about killing him and has ''poisoned people before''. Therefore, obviously, she's not the killer.]]
52	* NightmareFetishist: Bradley is obsessed with murderers to the point of buying illegal murder memorabilia on the dark web, and is fixated on death. [[spoiler: He didn't do the killing, but his illegal poisons ''were'' used, much to his horror.]]
53	* NonStandardGameOver: The only time the game can end prematurely. Midway through the game, [[spoiler: Nan will inform Abby about how Marcus was prone to acute paranoia a few years back, to the point of accusing the family of things they didn't do and becoming a shut in. This sows seeds of doubt within Abby and puts into question whether or not she wants to believe Marcus, who, after confronting him about it, confirms that Nan was telling the truth, but swears that this time he is not being paranoid. If you, as Abby, choose to no longer trust Marcus, she will end the call with him and log off. Time then moves forward a few days later, during Marcus's Virtual Funeral service. All other family members are in attendance but after exchanging condolences to each other they log off one by one until the now distraught Abby is the only one left in the call, silently sobbing, utterly beside herself, and feeling nothing but regret.]]
54	* OrgyOfEvidence: [[spoiler: June has the most evidence of any character, with multiple people confirming that she's violent, that she's poisoned people, that she hates Marcus, that she's made attempts to kill Marcus in the past, and that she attacked Marcus at the meeting. She's innocent, of course, she's just a massive asshole.]]
55	* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: The GoldenEnding, in which Abby both saves Marcus and fingers the correct murderer, is capped off with Abby giving one of these to [[spoiler:every single relative in the group call before cutting them all out of her life (except Lottie -- whose shallowness is a byproduct of their screwed-up family and tolerable enough that Abby says after taking some space she will text her again later-- and Bradley, who Abby comments isn't a bad person, just ''intensely'' creepy )]].
56	** [[spoiler:Aunty June also gives one to Abby in her ending, telling her that one day she'll be just like her, another bitter old drunk mourning her lost potential]].
57	* RewatchBonus:
58	** If you know the identity of the killer, you will notice some suspicious behavior. [[spoiler:In Round 1, Mum, Nan, and Aunt June all share the story of Uncle Marcus catching fire and who did what in response, but Nan leaves out that she applied a first aid kit, which is how the poison was applied. Immediately after Round 1, Nan turns her camera off, giving her time to send the threatening messages to Abby. After Round 3 when she shares about Uncle Marcus' previous paranoid delusions, she talks about anonymous e-mails despite her saying in Round 1 that she neither has an e-mail nor really understands how the internet works. And if you pair with Nan on Round 4, she suggests that Abby call it an early evening.]]
59	** On a lighter note, [[spoiler: the discovery that Toby isn't actually in Africa recontexutalises a lot of his scenes. It becomes clear that "emergencies" and "connection drops" occur whenever he's annoyed or not getting enough attention, that all of his claims to good deeds are not just self-serving but outright lies, and there's hints to be picked up on (the ''image'' never falters, and the African sounds are generic and repetitive because it's a recording).]]
60	* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: If correctly fingered but Marcus has passed away, the killer will privately inform Abby that [[spoiler:she'll just use her part of the family fortune, now bolstered by Marcus' share reverting to her, to bribe law enforcement to look the other way]].
61	* SmugSnake: In the ending where the killer is fingered but Marcus passes away, [[spoiler:Nan gloats that there's nothing Abby can do and she should just let it go for her own good, as Marcus' share in the family business goes back to Nan and she can now just [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney buy off]] anyone she needs to]].
62	* StreamerFriendlyMode: Pauses the game at all decisions points.
63	* TokenGoodTeammate: Nan and Lottie are the only members of the family to treat Abby with even basic kindness. [[spoiler: Then Nan turns out to be a murderer. Lottie, though, remains decent -- if shallow and egoistical -- and in the GoldenEnding is the only member of the family Abby stays in touch with.]]
64	* TragicMistake: If Abby concludes that [[spoiler:Marcus is faking his poisoning, she is absolutely distraught at his funeral]].
65	* TheUnfavourite: Abby is the entire family's punching bag, with everyone except Nan insulting her when they team up with her in one way or another.
66	* WellDoneSonGuy: Uncle Marcus, in trying to get Abby to turn on her own family and interrogate them in order to reveal their dark secrets, provokes her into admitting that she'd rather be a game designer and is only currently studying law because that's what her parents wanted her to do.

Context VideoGame / WhoPressedMuteOnUncleMarcus