Made for the JS13K Games competition, Murder Map Monkey is a silly, short puzzle game where you are looking to untangle a map of evidence, which has been presented to you by a detective. You are new to the job, and did not know it would not be investigation and instead be a weird untangling of maps, but now that you are here, that’s your job.
The map itself in Murder Map Monkey is divided like a grid. There are specific points on the map which represent locations; these cannot be moved. Everything else can be dragged around, with the goal of untangling all of the red rope so everything connects nicely. These different objects and cards need to fit in one of the grid spaces – you cannot just place them anywhere you want. When you select a specific card or bit of evidence, you can see what other ropes are attached to them. If the ropes are dotted, then they are crossed with something, but if they are plain red, they are not.
You need to move things around until everything is untangled! The first level is actually really easy, but as you continue it does get more cluttered and more challenging. Murder Map Monkey has five levels with dialogue in between each one, as well as a sixth level for freeplay mode, where the map is generated to play around with. Though I have no idea what crime I am solving, I found Murder Map Monkey to be a challenging and funny game. The dialogue is well written yet simple, and the levels are challenging and feel great to untangle.
For those unfamiliar, the JS13k Games competition has developers making a browser based game, that is under 13 kilobytes. This year’s theme was Death – giving developers one month to make and submit their game.
You can play Murder Map Monkey for free, in your browser.