In addition, about 1/6th or maybe 1/9th of the time when you visit one of the city’s three buildings, when you get your information, you also get a datum about the suspect themselves. You can’t get more extensive worldbuilding than just using real facts about Earth! This too rhymes with Ultima 4, which verbatim tells the player upfront “No, seriously! Read The Book Of History,” its own included-in-box lore manual. Much the point of this cagey data is that the presumed player is not likely to know off the top of your head that, say, Mexico is one of the world’s leading producers of coffee, and to decipher the data they will have to then refer to the 1985 edition of The World Almanac, which was originally included. This is, at a fundamental level, a variation on the quest structure that so dominated last post’s Ultima 4, but with all the filler RPG Stuff cut out and with the slight complication of being a little bit cagier about where to go next. That’s the entire game, you just do that over and over again. In any given city, the airport has between 2 and 5 other cities you can travel to, and the function of the data is to winnow this list of cities down to 1 plausible answer for where to go next and do it over again until you arrive at the final location of the suspect, having followed their path step for step. The idea with all of this data is that it won’t be stuff you will know off the top of your head. These datum you collect are, for example, things like color schemes of national flags - so “red white and blue” when France, or the UK, or the USA, or any other combination of two nations with that common color scheme on their flags are both equally plausible is not helpful enough at narrowing the range of possibility to a single point of fact and you’re gonna need more data. When you investigate at any one of these buildings, you get a datum, fictionalized as eyewitness testimony, which may or may not enough to draw a firm conclusion on. (Carmen Sandiego herself is the final boss.) You the player go to cities, and in every city you get a menu of three buildings. There are two obstacles to overcome, and both are simply a not-knowing that you need to make into a knowing: one, you don’t know where the criminal is, and two, you don’t know who the criminal is. Somebody has stolen an extremely valuable object from somewhere in the world. I guess in an abstract kinda sense you could consider the little knowledge morsels (henceforth “datum” or “data” in plural) that you get about the suspects as inventory items? But it has a totally different feel from ordinary lock-and-key reflavorings… Okay, let’s go over the “core loop” of the game real fast.
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