Demo offers first clues to Confidential Killings

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Golden Idol-styled deduction mystery set in 1970s Hollywood coming to Steam and itch.io

The popularity of Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol has spawned a whole new subgenre of deduction games in recent years. The latest to join the ranks of fill-in-the-blanks-styled detective mysteries is the upcoming Confidential Killings, a co-production between longtime collarators BRANE and Lorenzo Boni.

It's December 1978, and a string of seemingly unrelated murders has rocked Hollywood as "actors, writers, producers, are getting murdered one by one in cold blood." However, as you might expect of Tinseltown, "nothing is what it seems in the world of stars." As a private investigator, you have the chance to "take a peek behind the curtains [and] learn what's going on behind the glistening façade." It's your job to scour crime scenes, analyze clues, form connections and "meet a varied cast of characters [to] discover their secrets and ambitions." Only by piecing together an assortment of "twisted Hollywood scandals" will you be able to "unravel a web of conspiracies behind closed doors" and reveal who is really "pulling the strings" in a city "built on fame and secrecy."

Presented as a stylish hand-drawn, graphic novel-styled slideshow, Confidential Killings takes players from a variety of grisly crime scenes to "smoky lounges, flickering projectors, and scandal-ridden studios" steeped in "cinematic 70s noir atmosphere." Gameplay takes a page out of the Golden Idol playbook in having players click highlighted people and objects in the environment for closer examination, then select underlined words from text descriptions to automatically add them to your notebook. Once all available words within a scene have been collected, you'll then use them to reconstruct a partly filled version of events by adding the missing details. That means a fair bit of reading is involved as you gradually uncover evidence of more and more "double-dealing, backstabbing [and] betrayal." You could just brute force your way through the deduction phase, but it pays to be observant in an increasingly complex story involving "shifting timelines and characters in pursuit of the ultimate Hollywood conspiracy."

No target release date for Confidential Killings has yet been announced, but you can take your first bold steps into its world of "lies, ambition, and murder" through the playable demo available now from both Steam and itch.io for Windows and Mac.