Play Games
4 months ago
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Try the free demo for this quartet of bite-sized investigations
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Room6
Listen, I know we've spent the better part of the holidays harping on about all our favourite games of 2023 (and many more besides as part of our bonus Selection Boxes), but here's another one for you that I mainlined in a single day over Christmas and absolutely loved. It's Makoto Wakaido's Case Files Trilogy Deluxe - a collection of not three, but four detective stories in which you go about solving grizzly murders across different towns and villages in Japan. In short: if you like the investigation bits of Ace Attorney and need something to whet your appetite before the Apollo Justice Trilogy comes out on January 25th, this will be 100% up your street. It's currently just over a fiver in the Steam Winter Sale, and there's a free demo you can try as well for good measure.
This was yet another game I had hoped to review properly when it came out in the middle of October last year, but alas, time. Really, though, time wasn't much of an excuse in the end, as each case only takes just over an hour to solve. They're quite diddy and compact in that respect, a bit like a serial police drama you can just binge watch all in one go and then wonder where your afternoon went. You can play cases in any order, too, though I'd recommend playing them as they're presented number-wise, as while they're all standalone cases at the end of the day, there are a couple of call-backs in later cases to some of the earlier ones.
The muted colour palette and bright red blood really POP on the old Steam Deck OLED, lemme tell ya... | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Room6
The first case, for example, "The Executioner Linchpin", sets up the eponymous Makoto's backstory as he listens to his grandpa telling him about an old case he worked in the 80s trying to solve a series of mysterious beheadings. You then take control of adult Makoto in case two, "The Bogeyman's Woods", and continue his story as a growing gumshoe, hot-footing it around a large rural estate and its adjoining forest as you try and work out who (or what) is responsible for several deaths and disappearances. Case three then sees Makoto himself get framed for murder in a lovely Ace Attorney-style twist, while case four is a classic locked room mystery where you get trapped in a spooky, haunted hotel during a storm.
As you travel between scenes, you'll need to collect evidence and interrogate characters to find new clues and leads to further your investigation. You can also talk to people about specific clues by selecting them in your notebook and then 'raising' them in conversation, giving you new dialogue options to pursue. It's very similar to presenting evidence in Ace Attorney - just, you know, without the finger waggling and the shouting across a courtroom. Then, once you've got all the leads pertaining to that particular chapter, you'll enter Makoto's pillar-based mind palace to 'deduce' what you've found out so far and what to do next.
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Room6
It's all quite straightforward, but the cases are good fun and have some genuinely good twists and turns in them that keep you guessing and pulling you along, painting a promising picture for the dev's upcoming (and quite similar-looking) Urban Myth Dissoluton Center, which comes out (hopefully) later this year. The game's interface also does an excellent job of flagging up when you've exhausted an area for clues so you're not endlessly going round in circles or poking the same three characters all the time, and your notebook highlights which characters can speak to certain clues - again, saving you time and energy if you happen to get stuck (see the notebook screenshot above).
Even better, it's just over £6/$7 on Steam at time of writing, thanks to the ongoing Winter Sale (which ends on Thursday Jan 4th), and there's a free demo to try if you want to give it a go beforehand. That said, if you do happen to miss it on sale, its regular price of £11/$13 is still a pretty good bargain regardless for a good six-odd hours of excellent detectoring.
