True crime games you can solve

Most detective games are invented. A few let you work a real case, with the real names, dates and documents, and then show you what the court decided.

What counts as a true crime game

Plenty of games borrow the feel of true crime: case files, evidence boards, interview tapes. Far fewer use a real case. The ones that do have a duty the invented ones don’t: to stay with the record, to say what is documented and what is reconstructed, and to treat the people in it as people. That is why we only use cases more than a century old, from public court opinions and newspapers.

Three real cases from the 1890s

• The Dover candy box (1898): a box of candy mailed from San Francisco to Dover, Delaware, with a note signed “Mrs. C.” The record is People v. Botkin.
• The Bromo Seltzer Christmas gift (1898): a poisoned bottle mailed to a New York athletic club. The record is People v. Molineux.
• The Woodside cottage (1897): a man who went to see a rented cottage in Queens and never came back. The record is People v. Thorn.

Each history page tells the case up to the point where the evidence is laid out, and keeps the verdict in a fold, so you can play it first.

How Sleuth Break: 1898 works

In Sleuth Break: 1898 you get the case as documents: testimony, reports, letters and post office records, each dated and sourced. Lines marked “reconstructed” restate the court’s summary in the form of the original document. You read the file, answer the case questions, and name who did it. Then you see what the record shows and what happened next, including appeals and retrials, which in these cases changed the outcome more than once.

Prefer fiction?

If you would rather not work a real death, Her Backup Phone and Daily Sleuth are fully invented, and say so.