Inspector CLUEseau is a graphical version of the popular board game CLUE by HASBRO. In both games, the player goes between rooms and interviews the suspects, some that will give you clues concerning what the murder weapon was, what room the murder took place in, and who did it. The player basically accumulates these clues as they progress in the game... but they have a limit (75 turns) as to how long they have to solve the murder, until they are murdered themselves. The game features a map of the mansion the murder took place in, and draws the text using a machine language subroutine (the game itself is in BASIC). There are a couple of rules about two of the characters that the player needs to take into consideration when interrogating them: Mr. Denton will always lie, and Miss Violet sometimes lies. The other characters will always tell the truth.
The game is randomized each time, allowing for a lot of replay-ability. Clues are discovered by interviewing the suspects about a specific thing each time; asking them about a room, a possible weapon, and a particular person (given the special rules for two of them mentioned above). The game features a little bit of sound (including playing the first few of bars of the Pink Panther theme). There are also a secret passage leading to a secret room, where you have 10 tries to guess a 4 character code (similar to Mastermind, but with less hints). If you solve the code, you get a bonus clue.
Eventually your try accusing the killer when you think you have enough clues.
There are some oddities in the game - when you go to list your clues, it is the one part of the game (other than the secret passage / guessing the secret code) that reverts to the 32x16 text screen (instead of the graphics screen). If you have no clues discovered at this point, the screen just goes green and beeps, waiting for you to hit ENTER to continue.
Title: Inspector CLUEseau
Author: ???
Publisher: Petrocci Freelance Associates
Released: January 1983 (programmed 1982)
Requires: Color Computer 1 or 2, Extended BASIC, 32K RAM