A short little point and click detective mystery game set in a sci-fi futuristic world. You play as a Digital Exorcist trying to solve three increasingly complicated murders. There aren’t any interrogation minigames, quick time events, or required decisions, leaving you with quite an open detective system based on listening to testimony, gathering evidence, and presenting contradictions.
Unfortunately while this game has an incredible premise and world setting, the actual gameplay consists of only 3 cases, one of which is mostly a tutorial, so it’s difficult to recommend this game for its full price, but I genuinely cannot wait to see what else the developers can do with the world that this game establishes. Tbh the wackiest thing about this is that it’s developed by Kitfox Games, the same people that made hecking Boyfriend Dungeon of all games what a weird tone shift.
You are a Digital Exorcist who is affiliated with the Church of Ain Soph. That may be a weird sentence, mixing technology and religion in such a heavy handed way, but surprisingly it works. The world youre in has a lot of future tech including implants and other cool stuff like that. Of course though, the problem with biotech is that it can be infected with viruses, or rather with daemons. Thats where your exorcism comes in, you have to figure out who did the murder, how, and most importantly why. Once you know those, you’ll be able to expose the truth, and purge the daemon corrupting the perpetrators soul.
When you arrive you’ll know almost nothing other than who died, but you can click around the scene to move around and find clues and evidence to add to your investigation notes, and then once you have all the evidence you can find, you can get into the meat of the investigation: interrogation. You can talk to each of the suspects and they’ll tell you their timeline of events. You can then either ask for more detail about something they (or someone else) has said, or propose a contradiction based on someone elses testimony or some of your evidence. There is no penalty to presenting something that doesn’t produce a lead. If you catch them, they’ll either double down leading to a contradiction, or they’ll amend their story to fit with the new information.
Once you know enough about the situation, you can accuse someone by explaining exactly when they could have committed the crime, how they could have done it, and why they did it, or more specifically, what character flaw did a daemon exploit to make them do it. Once you figure out everything, you can expose the daemon, and then exile it to complete the case.
The presentation in this game is actually super nice. All the stuff you know about a case is laid out for you in a timeline at the bottom of the screen, and you can easily scrub around to see what (was proposed to have) happened. The game is also partially voice acted, which is a nice detail. I can’t really think of any bugs or issues I had with actually playing the game, just with it’s length. One other thing to note though is there is no hint system in the game, it’s all on you to figure things out. But as I said above, there is also no drawback to making mistakes, so in the utterly worst case, you can just brute force solutions, even if that makes it less fun.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/717560 £14.99
Itch.io: https://kitfoxgames.itch.io/lucifer-within-us $20.00 (you might have it from a mega bundle already)
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