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...