Chronique des Silencieux to be revealed later this year

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Kickstarter coming next month for isometric deduction-based mystery set in 1970s France

Bordeaux, France, may seem like the ideal vacation spot for good food, fine wine, and a rich cultural history to explore, but for the star of Pierre Feuille Studio's upcoming Chronique des Silencieux, it's the location of a perplexing mystery that will need plenty of deductive skills to solve.

Players control a young man named Eugène, who has settled in southern France in the 1970s to become a private eye. But his first case will "decidedly be a delicate one" when he's hired by an old history professor named Victor Dousvalon to investigate his own background following an "apparently harmless accident." Dousvalon has committed himself to "shrouding his past life in secrecy from everyone around, including his own daughter Catherine." But what is he hiding, and why go to the lengths of having Eugène rummage through his past instead of simply revealing his story first-hand? And why, after many years of estrangement from her father, is Catherine now so interested? These are just some of the questions that players will need to answer for themselves in order to "dig out the secrets of a stubborn old man."

The world of Chronique des Silencieux will be explored largely via an isometric perspective, with occasional first-person zooms for a closer look when needed. Controls are simple point-and-click, yet with the unusual ability to pan the camera simply by moving the cursor toward the edges of the screen. You will encounter a variety of key characters around the city, each with their own information they may be reluctant to share, or at least to do so honestly. In order to uncover the truth, you must "search through family papers, ask personal questions, call at inopportune times and be generally nosey." Only by pursuing leads, poring through documents and thoroughly interrogating witnesses can you hope to detect contradictions and even outright falsehoods in their testimonies. To "piece together the lives, the choices and the tragedies people are running from," you'll need to physically make all the right connections in your casebook, as the developers are determined to make this a "true" detective game in which "the protagonist doesn’t feed you the answers to the mystery, where the player is the real driver of the investigation."

Chronique des Silencieux could be released before the end of this year on Steam for Windows PC, but before that can happen a Kickstarter campaign will be launched on May 17th to help finance the rest of its production. Later this summer, a standalone demo will be released, set five years before the events of the main game when Eugène has just arrived in Bordeaux following the death of his mother and becomes mixed up in the affairs of his mysterious uncle, laying the groundwork for his new career as an investigator.

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