The Silver Case

The short version: If you enjoyed Killer7 and Flower, Sun, and Rain, you will almost certainly enjoy The Silver Case. If you didn’t enjoy K7 and FSR, you won’t enjoy TSC. If you haven’t played K7 and FSR, then your enjoyment of TSC will depend on what you look for in games: a fun time or a thought-provoking experience. TSC’s story is well-written, but extremely slow-paced and difficult to understand. It’s challenging, dreamlike (it delights in confounding you at every turn), and runs the tonal gamut from terrifying to hilarious. The art and music perfectly complement the writing. TSC, like K7 and FSR, is a powerful testament to how writing and aesthetics can come together to become something exponentially more engaging than the sum of their parts. The gameplay is very minimal, only making up about 5% of the experience—just some light puzzle solving and exploration that rarely gets in the way. The more gameplay-heavy segments are frustrating and repetitive, but they’re over quickly. There was a time when Grasshopper Manufacture was my favorite developer. While I haven’t loved their post-No More Heroes output, TSC has been a great reminder of why I fell in love with them. It isn’t very “fun” as a game, but it’s an imaginative, intelligent, inspiring, unique experience—all exactly what I was looking for.

This game involves typing long words into a primitive interface, but you can't just type the word with your keyboard, you have to select each letter of the alphabet by scrolling through all the letters of the alphabet with an arrow key, one letter at a time. The puzzle solving amounts to typing these words into a decoding panel, getting a gibberish code out of the decoding panel, and then retyping that gibberish into the first panel. This is not challenging, it's just boring busywork. I would not stay at a job that required me to do this mindless crap -- why would I do it for fun? If the storytelling was compelling, I might stay, but my teammates are one-dimensional and have no personality, and I can't even see them on screen. They are supposedly in the room with me as I solve these puzzles, but you can't see them -- you wander through bland empty environments your teammates are supposed to be in with you, but they are invisible. The music is an incredibly repetitive loop, and when I tried switching from the remixed music to the original music it sounded exactly the same. The game tries to give an impression of being visually interesting by having random words flash in various parts of the screen, which just clutters the interface. I loathe this "game" and wish I had tried it before it was too late to get a refund.

This game is probably best for people who have played and enjoyed Flower, Sun, and Rain or Killer 7. I wouldn’t recommend trying to get any gameplay benefits out of it, but just try to enjoy the atmosphere and story. With gameplay sections you need to keep in mind how weird gameplay was on many PS1 games. Just having this game in English is something I never imagined and still think about years after finishing it. That being said, the story is weird and many characters have this unique sort of crassness that people who’ve played the games I mentioned should be used to by now, though this is the most story heavy game Suda 51 has made (as well as its sequel) so I can understand a bit why it seemed to drive other reviewers crazy. But I think anyone who’s enjoyed a Suda 51 story before will get a lot out of this if they plow through. It’s a lot of set up in the first two chapters but it starts to pay off and shoots in various different interesting directions from there. The sound design is also amazing and I’ve had this game stuck in my mind recently only because I heard someone use the sound that ends a scene in a YouTube video. Ironically for a game where you should kill the past, it’ll stick with you for a long time.

This is a remaster-slash-remake of Suda51's first game for the PS1, translated for the first time to hype up a sequel that came out more recently. As a long time Suda fan, this game started out quite strong for me and I was way into it's bizarre approach and cool mystery. But the further you get, the less of a game it is and more of a visual novel it becomes. Which isn't to say it's not enjoyable as a visual novel, but, it doesn't start that way and it becomes something else from the outset, and the outset is much more interesting, both to play and to experience. There are puzzles to solve and spooky mysteries to encounter, but then it quickly becomes an on-rails story with hardly anything for the player to do but press X to continue. I thought that the A-side/B-side approach was interesting conceptually; after each chapter where you encounter/deal with a crime, there's a side chapter where you play as an investigative reporter figuring out more of the motives and details to the events you've just seen. Unfortunately most of those side chapters are even less on the gameplay side, with the player being able to 1. walk to the computer 2. check email 3. check phone 4. check pet turtle 5. end of list. Granted that this was Grasshopper Manufacture's first game ever, and the PS1 era had some oddball ideas and experiments, but it just doesn't really hold up as a game. The story is good enough to hold me over, and I'm definitely going to check out the other games in the series (one direct sequel and a spin-off), and hopefully those improve and iterate on the ideas presented here.