With the time he has in between sports and school work, senior Vincent Cacciotti planned and executed a complete murder mystery that took place on November 4, 2023. The title of his game was A Tell-Tale Funeral.
Since A Tell-Tale Funeral was not his first dabble in creating murder mysteries, the complexity and difficulty of its storyline was considerably greater than his first game from 2022, named, A Red Christmas.
A Tell-Tale Funeral followed the murder of Tristan Holiday, a wealthy critic with plenty of enemies. His death was originally ruled as an accidental overdose, but was soon discovered to be homicide. Twenty-seven B-A students were invited to Tristan’s memorial service at Vincent’s house, where the evening began with senior Ethan Johnston’s character (Ethan Aeries) found murdered in the bathroom. The goal of the evening was to discover who, out of the twenty-seven guests, was the murderer.
Each individual involved had to know their own extensive backgrounds and alibis to be able to defend themselves throughout the night’s accusations and incriminations. In the beginning of the creation process, Vincent sent various forms to the participants in order to create their storylines.
“I had the individuals develop [their storylines] how they wanted first, then edited them,” Vincent quoted.
Each person’s plot took approximately two hours to complete, unless they were a crucial character.
Throughout the seven months of development from start to finish, Vincent drew inspiration from Criminal Minds and credits “The Westing Game”, a novel read in seventh-grade English class.
“I sent out a form seeing who would want to be the killer, then that night, I picked Ava [Kensinger] and made her role first…Then I added in the rest and gave some people a motive for one or two killings, then I assigned alibis and just gradually revealed all of this,” said Vincent.
Clues throughout the night were found in various locations, and could be found in the smallest of details, from the time on a clock to a sentence from a fake news article.
“I’ve been making escape rooms since sixth grade, so I am usually able to just pull clues out of thin air,” Vincent mentioned. “But, with so many, I divided the game into five “missions” and a series of clues need to be solved in order to unlock the next mission.”
Out of every step of the creation process, his favorite was talking to the players about their backstories and being able to inspire some of their creativity.
However, maintaining confidentiality over the killer’s identity was Vincent’s least favorite part of the game.
“I was so excited that I hated not talking about it, and keeping the identity of the murderer to myself,” he said.
A-Tell Tale Funeral was rated an eight out of ten by Vincent, on a scale of difficulty. Yet, he anticipated the murder to be solved, as he does “everything in [his] power” to lead the group to the killer.
“It was fun and enjoyable,” quoted participant Zach Pier, who was one of the first to take the clues and guide others to the right answer.
After hours of back-and-forth and advocating for evidence as to who the killer was, the correct identity was guessed by the majority. The players won the game and successfully caught the killer.
