Demo also available for text-based database-mining mystery on Steam
The work-from-home philosophy has become so widespread of late, now it even applies to solving mysteries from the comfort of your own home without ever stepping foot out the door. The latest game to embrace remote detective work in a very literal way is indie developer BlackRobe’s newly released CaseCracker.
In the city of Chicheng, the police have implemented a brand new computer system for identifying elite crime-solving talent. As a potential recruit, now it’s your turn to use the eponymous “true detection system” to crack five separate cases within the system’s defined parameters. The crimes are very real, all of them occurring right there in Chicheng before being stored in the database as case files. It’s up to you to delve these files in order to find the truth, but beware, as “what others describe is not the real truth,” so “the only person you should trust is yourself.”
Not unlike a text-driven version of Her Story without the full-motion video, CaseCracker provides players with a computerized interface for accessing police records. As if you were the prospective applicant yourself, you must search the files available to you and highlight relevant keywords that can be used to interact with other elements in the database. This, in turn, will open up new interconnected clues and more relevant text to drive the investigation forward until you’re able to deduce the correct culprit for each case. It’s not necessary to find all available leads to successfully solve the case, but pursuing additonal clues will reveal extra story details and background information that shine light on the “Chicheng worldview.”
Originally launched in May as an Early Access title, the complete version of CaseCracker is now available on Steam, along with a demo that represents the first of five cases in the full release.
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