I Built a Murder-Mystery Game in a Weekend. Here’s What It Taught Me About Why Training Is Boring.

Title screen of The Coins of Asclepius: the game name in tall cream letters over a rainy noir street with a red neon bar sign reading The Last Stand

Here’s something that bothers me. People will happily spend an evening following a fictional detective through the rain to find out who killed a man who might not be dead. Those same people will abandon a 20-minute compliance course halfway through and come back only when their manager sends a second reminder.

It isn’t the subject matter. Nobody needs to know who sent Mrs. Whitlock that photograph. It’s the design. So I built a murder mystery in a weekend to see what a story does that a course doesn’t — and what we can steal from it.

The game

The Coins of Asclepius is a short noir mystery that runs right in your browser. It’s based on illustrations and a detective story I created back in 2020, and it finally got the chance to move.

You play Ben Calder, a private investigator of twenty years, with a revolver in the filing cabinet and a dog named Lucy who has opinions. A widow walks in out of the rain, puts a photograph on his desk of the husband she buried six weeks ago, and sets a strange silver coin down next to it. Every clock in town says it’s almost 9:15. From there the case runs from a rainy American city to Naples and Dubrovnik.

Detective Ben Calder in his office at night, with a narration box introducing him as a private investigator of twenty years

Building it reminded me how much of good game design is just good instructional design, with nobody calling it that.

Why people finish a mystery

It opens with a question, not an answer. A compliance course starts with “By the end of this module you will be able to…” — which tells you everything that’s going to happen. The mystery starts with a dead man in a fresh photograph. One of those makes you want to know what happens next. The other makes you check how many slides are left.

The player does the thinking. Ben keeps case notes: what he knows, what’s in his pockets, what he should do right now. But the player is the one connecting the clues. The game never stops to explain what a clue means. Most training explains everything, then quizzes you on the explanation. That’s recognition, not reasoning.

Failure is fast, funny and cheap. You can die in this game in some genuinely stupid ways. When you do, you get a tombstone that reads “That was a dumb way to die,” a one-line reason, and you try again, a little wiser. Compare that with failing a compliance quiz: no explanation, and you retake the whole thing. One teaches you something. The other teaches you to guess better.

Help is one keypress away, in character. Stuck? Press L and ask Lucy what she thinks you should do next. She’s a dog, but she’s usually right. There’s no help menu, no FAQ, no “contact your administrator” — just a nudge from a character you already like, at the moment you need it.

Ben Calder standing in his office with his dog Lucy, as the narration says she is the best partner he ever had

There’s always one clear next step. The top of the screen always says what Ben should do right now, in plain language. Not five learning objectives. One thing. Do it, and the story moves.

Ben Calder by his desk, with an on-screen prompt reading Call it a night

It has a voice. The narration is hard-boiled and a little ridiculous. (“Lucy thumped her tail on the floor. Best partner I ever had. Never once asked for a raise.”) It’s written to be enjoyed, not to be accurate in front of a legal review. Tone is the cheapest engagement tool there is, and most training throws it away.

What training designers can steal

You don’t need 3D, a noir soundtrack or a talking dog. You need the mechanics underneath them:

  1. Open with a case, not objectives. Start with a situation the learner wants resolved: a complaint, an incident, a near miss. Put the objectives in the facilitator guide.
  2. Make learners collect the evidence. Let them dig through the documents, the emails and the policy to find what matters, instead of reading it pre-highlighted.
  3. Let wrong choices play out, quickly. Show the consequence of a bad decision in the scenario itself, explain it in one line, and let them try again from that point, not from the start.
  4. Put help one click away, in a voice. A coach, a coworker, a mentor character — someone who gives a hint in the moment instead of a link to a 40-page PDF.
  5. Always show the next step. One clear “right now” instruction beats a menu of options every time.
  6. Write like a person. You can be accurate and still sound like a human being. Your learners will notice.

None of this is new to anyone who has built a good branching scenario. But building a game, where nobody is required to keep playing, is a brutal and very useful test. If a player gets bored, they just leave. That’s exactly what our learners do too — they just stay logged in while they do it.

Play it yourself

The first case is a demo, and you can play it in your browser: The Coins of Asclepius. It works best on a computer with the sound on. You can also play it with a connected controller.

If you have a compliance course that people click through without remembering a thing, let’s talk. Turning a policy into a story people actually finish is exactly the kind of work I love.