Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? review

Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? tells the story of Abby who receives some shocking news from her uncle Marcus mere minutes before her usual family online quiz: one of their family members has poisoned him during a family meeting and he doesn’t have long left to live. Marcus tasks her to ask her family members who could’ve poisoned Marcus, who seems universally detested by the family, except Abby. Can you ask the right questions and learn the truth before it’s too late?

Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? is another interesting interactive movie, or FMV (Full Motion Video) from Wales Interactive. The core experience is watching family members bicker as they play what you expect to be a friendly quiz between family members while you conduct your investigation. During the quiz, you’ll be called upon to select a family member to team with in order to answer questions from the selected quiz master. While trying to figure out the answers, you’ll be given the opportunity to quiz your family member and learn more about the family meeting.

Sometimes during the quiz, after certain conversations, Marcus will interrupt you and try to be helpful; and not succeeding most of the time. As you’d expect with such a dysfunctional family, there is Abby’s mom, aunt, and cousins; all of which come across as despicable human beings. Somehow Wales Interactive managed to create a story where all the characters are garbage human beings; whether it be the bitch mom or aunt, a depressed teen who buys guns and the pop star who’s full of herself. It’s even impossible to have sympathy for the main victim, Marcus. While I can understand they wanted to create a story where we need to find a culprit, but from the offset, you want to accuse all of them because they are all insufferable.

As you progress along, when you discover new clues, you’ll have a prompt in the bottom right corner indicating as much. You’ll then be able to enter the pause menu and connect the dots in order to find the proper one to accuse. Unfortunately, if you don’t manage to gather enough clues, you won’t be able to accuse anyone.

As a whole, there’s nothing really problematic here aside from some story logic. For example, during one of my playthroughs, I was about to run out of time and unfortunately couldn’t ask the proper question and figure out which poison (out of 3) was used to poison Marcus, but I was still forced to make a choice and decide which poison was used so Marcus could use the perfect antidote. While I can understand the decision behind this, I was more expecting Marcus to die without me having to intervene.

Presentation wise, not much to say. Given that it’s an FMV, it’s hard to screw up. Actors do a bang up job as a whole with their delivery and facial expression; and as I mentioned, each actor do a great job with making their characters come alive and insufferable. One interesting thing of note is that the editing job is a major improvement from other FMV entries from Wales. Where it was obvious when the editing was done in previous games, here everything is seamless. On the audio side of things, not much of a score, but as mentioned, each actor do their best with lines and they do a solid, professional job.

On a final note, Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? is another can’t miss FMV experience from Wales Interactive. The story is gripping, although there are some plotholes depending on your choices. Given the various choices, if you can get over how horrible and insufferable the characters are, there’s a lot of replay value to find out the truth. If you love FMV, Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? is a must play.