Demo shines light on Dark Alley a month before launch

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Next installment in the Detective Bennett series coming November 5th from the creator of The Empty Desk 

Last year indie Andorran developer CheesecakeGames introduced players to homicide detective Thomas Bennett in The Empty Desk, the first of a planned series of standalone mystery adventures. Next up in the Detective Bennett: Solved Cases anthology will be Dark Alley, due out next month. 

While the first game cooped Bennett up in a single high-rise building for a supernatural murder case, the new one turns him loose on the streets and back alleys of Kyoto, Japan, circa 2012. It's supposed to be a "straightforward missing persons investigation" as a British detective named Edward Hale has disappeared. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems, not in a city "where everyone seems to know more than they're willing to admit." As players "examine objects, question witnesses, take notes and revisit old evidence," it soon becomes clear that the Yakuza crime syndicate is involved somehow, and yet even they are "far from the whole story."

As with its predecessor, Dark Alley is a first-person 3D adventure controlled via keyboard/mouse or gamepad, but here you'll have more room to explore as you traverse a variety of locations "inspired by modern Japan, including Gion's lantern-lit streets, Nishiki Market, hidden temples, bamboo forests, traditional ryokans" and more. There will be some light environmental puzzle-solving to do along the way, but as an experienced detective you'll mostly be called upon to "observe, listen, [and] ask uncomfortable questions" when necessary. The characters you encounter all have "their own motivations," so you'll need to learn more about each to "decide who deserves your trust" and even "form uneasy alliances." While The Empty Desk emphasized eerie paranormal events to create fear, here the story appears to be more grounded in real-world challenges, at least at first. Of course, with the Yakuza after you, that doesn't mean you're in any less danger. 

Dark Alley is just around the corner, expected to launch on November 5th. In the meantime, a very short playable demo is available on Steam to download for Windows PC. 

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