Murderous Muses is a 2023 murder mystery FMV game from D'Avekki Studios. It is a Spiritual Successor to their previous games, The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and The Shapeshifting Detective. The player takes on the role of a security guard at an art gallery on Mirlhaven Island. It has been one year since the unsolved murder of artist Mordechai Grey and the gallery is hosting an exhibition of his paintings. At night, the gallery's geography changes and Grey's portraits act as windows into his memories. The objective of the game is to figure out which of Grey's muses murdered him.
The suspects are:
- Sunday Finch, a tennis player.
- Xavier Haan, a former surgeon turned clockmaker.
- Profesor Catherine Myers, the Vice Justice of Mirlhaven Island.
- Otto Pipistrelle, a ventriloquist.
- Lilith Rendell, an undertaker.
- Dominique Serrant, a burlesque dancer.
This is D'Avekki's first game to make use of 3D animation. The art gallery is an explorable 3D environment that allows the player to hunt for clues and solve a variety of puzzles that help shed light on the world of the game.
This game features examples of the following tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Rupert Booth once again plays a detective, as he did in Contradiction and Shapeshifting Detective (though this time only his voice is heard).
- Asshole Victim: Everything we learn about Mordechai Grey does not paint a flattering picture of the man. He was willing to blackmail people and manipulate them to get whatever he wanted. It is no surprise that so many people had a motive to kill him.
- Casanova Wannabe: Otto is a shameless womanizer and has a misogynistic attitude that prevents him from forming lasting relationships.
- "Day of the Week" Name: The twin tennis pros are named Sunday and Monday.
- Deadpan Snarker: Otto's puppet Pip frequently makes snide remarks at the expense of Otto.
- Faceless Protagonist: As with D'Avekki's previous games, the game is told from a first-person perspective and all we know about the protagonist is that they are a security guard.
- The Ghost: Mordechai Grey is never seen nor heard at any point in the game. All scenes involving him are depicted from his point of view.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Your boss Sasha jokingly speculates you might be stuck in a time loop reliving the same three days over and over.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Lilith believes that eating corpses is a perfectly acceptable way of disposing of them.
- Karma Houdini: If you fail to find the murderer, they get away with their crime and the murder remains unsolved.
- Mythology Gag: Copies of D'Avekki's game Dark Nights with Poe & Munro can be found in a storage room along with two paintings from that game.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Mordechai Grey's murder occurs one year before the start of the game and is the event that much of the plot revolves around.
- Sanity Slippage: Sasha says that your predecessor Higgins was seeing things that were not there. It soon becomes clear that Higgins was not as crazy as he seemed.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Dominique is an ambitious burlesque dancer who uses her good looks to get her way.
- Spooky Painting: Many of Mordechai Grey's paintings qualify. They have an otherworldly quality that fascinates and disturbs in equal measure.
- The Tease: Dominique enjoys flaunting her body but stresses that she is never fully nude during her dance routine.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We see memories of a mysterious girl named Kira whom Mordechai claimed was his daughter. The game never tells you what became of her after the murder.
