Recently my wife and I were discussing the best and worst video games we played in 2024, and she was surprised that I ranked immersive murder mystery sim The Painscreek Killings so low. I was surprised that she was surprised, since I remembered excoriating it, while she remembered me giving a glowing opinion. It turns out I had done both, at different times, so here is my second-chance attempt at synthesizing my evidently mixed opinion into a holistic review. The Painscreek Killings is a first-person mystery game that "mimics real world investigation". You play as journalist Janet Kelly, who has come to Painscreek to investigate the cold case murder of philanthropist businesswoman Vivian Roberts and the subsequent abandonment of the town. Armed with only a camera and whatever real-life notes you choose to take, your goal is to solve Vivian's murder and get a front page snapshot for your story. Of course, the game is called The Painscreek Killing s , and as you in...

When Nintendo remastered the Famicom Detective Club games a couple years back, it was a pleasant surprise, but I didn't have "the series gets a third game after 35 years" on my 2024 bingo card. Famicom Detective Club wasn't the first mystery adventure game (that would be The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983), but you can see its DNA in a lot of subsequent Japanese adventure games such as the Ace Attorney series. Despite being fondly regarded, the series only got two entries before designer and writer Yoshio Sakamoto moved on to some obscure game about a space bounty hunter . Despite some occasional 80s clunk, The Missing Heir (1988) is a solid mystery game that takes a lot of inspiration from Seishi Yokomizo's books ( The Village of Eight Graves particularly, IMO). The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989) is a great mystery game, whose oppressive atmosphere of paranoia builds into a memorably creepy finale that lingers long after you beat it. How does th...

Originally posted May 8, 2024.   An early footnote in The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story summarizes Edogawa Ranpo’s A Taxonomy of Mystery Tricks . One such trick is the ‘narrative trick,’ clues which are disguised through the presentation of the story. But, the game assures us, “such tricks are considered impossible in films & TV.” Anyone who’s seen Poirot ‘s awkward adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd would probably agree. But a suspicious player might well wonder if The Centennial Case , a PC/PS4/Switch game presented in live-action FMV format, will attempt to invent one. Haruka Kagami is an up-and-coming mystery novelist whose science consultant, the biologist Eiji Shijima, invites her to his family succession ceremony—apparently for research purposes, but secretly because an unidentified hundred-year-old skeleton has been found under the Shijima family’s cherry tree. To identify the skeleton Haruka and her editor Akari Yamase dig into records of strange...