Deja Vu

Deja Vu opens with you waking up in a bar bathroom with no memory, a split lip, a gun in your pocket and a dead man somewhere in the building. You have a name you have to work out and a frame you have to beat.

It is the second of the MacVenture games and it plays like a hard-boiled detective novel, using the same verb-and-cursor interface as Shadowgate but with an important addition: a clock. Actions take time, the city has a day/night cycle, and if you fail to piece together what happened before the deadline, you are convicted of the murder. That turns exploration into triage, because some leads expire and some objects disappear while you are elsewhere. Where Shadowgate punishes you with traps, Deja Vu punishes you with wasted hours, and its multiple endings depend on whether you solve the case at all rather than just on which door you picked.

• ▸Amnesia premise in which your own identity is a puzzle to solve
• ▸A running clock with a day/night cycle and a hard deadline
• ▸Leads and items that expire if you are slow to follow them
• ▸Multiple endings determined by how much of the case you actually solve