Having never partaken in a murder mystery before, this week I found myself at the centre of two in quick succession. Of course, I’ve watched mystery movies and pointed my finger at the screen like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme shouting “it was him!” at every conceivable suspect, but I’m rarely correct.

It doesn’t help that my fiancée is really good at guessing killers. I put it down to all the murder podcasts she listens to, but her unwavering logic and eye for a puzzle make her a formidable opponent in mystery-offs. When we were invited to an in-person murder mystery where we tried to figure out which person at our table killed King Louis XVI in the midst of revolutionary Paris, however, we were both stumped.

The murder mystery in question was bought online and narrated by CD – proper old school. Writ with constant innuendo and more suspects than a child who lost their prized Pokemon card at school, it was good fun. Every single one of the eight of us at the table guessed the killer incorrectly, although in fairness one of them was dead too by this point.

The clues were interesting and the reveals grand, however I don’t think it quite stuck the landing. The actual murder occurred by means never uncovered and, considering everything was completely scripted, that felt like a cop-out. If we’d just failed to deduct who had the best motive or means, I would have accepted defeat, but a revelation that one character had switched bottles of poison and sleeping draught despite never being in the vicinity of the kitchen for the duration of the mystery was a bridge too far.

You should come out of a murder mystery feeling satisfied that you caught the killer, or annoyed that you missed a crucial piece of evidence. Having every shred of evidence handed to us at predetermined points of the evening, and having the setup be so scripted that no clue could be missed, yet pulling a fast one and including a crucial, never-before-then-seen piece of evidence whipped out in the killer’s final monologue to explain the murder felt like pot luck. I wasn’t bad at deducing, I simply had a one in six chance of guessing right (with one player dead and knowing myself to be innocent, that is).

You’ll forgive me for being slightly reticent coming into my second murder mystery of the week. I trusted my Dungeon Master more than a man on a CD putting on a ridiculous French accent, but I didn’t want to be duped again.

It didn’t start well. This time the murder victim was a Pirate king, and this being Dungeons & Dragons, it was far less scripted. That’s my preferred way of doing things, but it took us nearly three hours to find a lead. We knew a few things for sure: we were not suspects, the king had no visible wounds, and he’d been at the pub the night before. We suspected that he was poisoned, we’d interviewed nearly everyone on the island and identified some shifty suspects, we’d found plenty of motives, a couple of red herrings, but no evidence.

I was resigned to another night of failure. And then, underneath a creaky plank in a ship’s cargo hold: the poison. We had the murder weapon, our suspicions had been confirmed, and we had an even stronger lead. As we were about to set forth for our final round of questioning, however, the worst happened. It was time to end the session. At nearly midnight on a school night, I didn’t begrudge my party members for yearning for their beds, but I was ready to go for another hour at least. Just as we had found the cold, hard, purple evidence, we called it a night.

I think I’ve figured out the murderer, or at least the murder conspirators who worked together to dethrone the King. But in that last hour of excited findings, of suspicions confirmed and the tangled knot of mystery unravelling before our very eyes, I understood why people love this. Even on a bad murder mystery I enjoy hanging out with friends, but it goes to a whole new level when the crime is engaging too.

You, like I, will have to wait to find out whether I’ve cracked the case of the dead pirate King, but in the meantime I’m going to seek out some murder mysteries of my own. I’m looking to classic point-and-click adventures, Agatha Christie novels, and I’m even writing one of my own, depositing my French Revolution investigators onto the Definitely Not Nostromo to get to the bottom of a murder that hasn’t even been committed yet. One will kill, and one will die. Who will it be? Find out when I’ve solved the most difficult mystery of all: finding a date when a group of friends are all available.

Next: EA Sports FC 24's Team Of The Year Is Completely Wrong