Asbury Pines is a murder mystery of dizzying scale that has you joining the dots from the Stone Age to Armageddon

I was unaware of incremental mystery management sim Asbury Pines till kindly Mr_B mentioned it in this week’s Maw round-up. It launches into early access today, and has a pretty lung-emptying setup. You’re trying to solve a murder in a hitherto sleepy small American town. To do this, you must oversee and make connections between around 50 characters – some of them animals and plants – across 12 historical eras, spewing your brain outward from the present day to the Stone Age and the post-apocalyptic future.

This is presented as a dense and whirring mixtable of icons, bars, progression trees, timelines, and story cards, like a 4X research tree but with a narrative shoved through it. Did you think you were being a clever custard with your swanky evidence board in Alan Wake 2? Try Asbury Pines on for size, gumshoe – it’s like Cloud Atlas for accountants. They do call it “accessible” in marketing materials, mind.

“As you unlock an array of characters, artifacts and places from one era to the next, combine them and their unique stats in different ways to build and link resource production economies… across centuries,” the Steam page explains. “What emerges is a sprawling factory of working lives that unveils a story embedded in the flow of time.”

A factory for solving a riddle of millennial dimensions? Indeed, I favour this concept. As Pierre de Laplace wrote, “an intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom.”

I don’t think you’ll get to determine the fate of individual atoms in Asbury Pines, but you’re treated to a varied cast, ranging from toon cavemen through latter-day theoretical physicists to startlingly loquacious raccoons. A sample of a raccoon’s inner monologue: “thinglets – bigs, smalls, shiners, colorfuls – I find (many). But urge not leave my bones! Why? Why?” See also, me trying to curate a bunch of PC games every week.

It seems broadly redolent of Cultist Simulator and other card-based resource management games. You’ll pop people and trinkets into locations to carry out tasks. Given that the management element engulfs multiple centuries, it seems like you’ll have indefinite leisure to scrub back and forth, understanding the wealth of information flowering under your hands, but I’m basing that purely on the screens and videos.

There’s no estimated date for the final release yet – they’re planning “to launch 1.0 in a rapid timeframe after we establish benchmarks and goals from community engagement.”

The one sour note is the presence of a generative AI disclosure. “AI assisted with early art concepting,” developers Chaystar Unlimited LLC explain. “Every piece of final in-game art is handmade by the developers.” We’ve been chatting recently in the Treehouse about the many different shades and degrees of generative AI implementation. I feel like we should talk more about the use of genAI for “brainstorming” and other “non-final” work, and where that sits within larger fears about automating jobs to enrich executives and investors.