Choose-your-own-murder game Loretta comes out next month

The store description calls Loretta, "a psychological thriller that makes the player an accessory to the heroine's crimes, leading her through a self-crafted nightmare." It's essentially a point-and-click adventure where you're a 1940s housewife who has committed murder, with flashbacks letting you decide how exactly that happened and then how you're going to cover it up.

One section might have you figuring out how to deal with a nosy detective after the fact, while another bounces you back to before the murder happens to buy some rat poison. The story slowly unravels and, if you're not careful, so do your lies.

There are minigames breaking up the chapters, simple puzzles and word association games, but mostly it's about choosing the right thing to say and trying to hold things together. It's a rural noir, with all the tension of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Diego Arguello gave some impressions of a demo last year, saying, "The way it deals with infidelity and marital problems from Loretta's perspective sets a promising foundation, as does the way the writing shifts, increasing the profanity as a deliberate reflection of Loretta's internal state after committing murder, and the way she chooses to remember everything that led to that moment. Whether or not her attitudes are not undermined by the rest of the game's writing remains to be seen. Even with just a short glimpse of her deeds, though, I'm willing to hear her side of the story."

According to the list of Loretta's features, "Branching paths and multiple endings allow for a custom experience or opportunity for replay. Choose Loretta's fate and explore the multiple opportunities as they present themselves to her."

Loretta will be available on Steam and GOG from February 16.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.