The Silver Case takes place in 1999 in the (fictional) 24th Ward of Tokyo, where the murderer Kamui Uehara committed the titular Silver Case twenty years prior. He's thought to now be harmless, until he escapes from the mental hospital at which he's being detained. We play as the unnamed sole survivor of the unit first dispatched to recover Kamui, who then finds himself swept up into the 24th Ward's Heinous Crimes Unit, which investigates... heinous crimes.
The game is about the protagonist's adventures with the Heinous Crimes Unit, and the crimes they investigate. Well, that's what it's about for the first half, at least. After that the game slowly devolves into a bizarre self-contradictory mess.
The Silver Case is an adventure game that takes place in a fully rendered 3D environment, but your movement is limited to set points in the environment. So you walk around, talking to people and examining things until you trigger the next cutscene. And that's basically the entire game. The prologue has puzzles, and then they never show up again. (The remake also has a button to auto-solve the puzzles, so you don't even need to deal with them if you don't want to.) You have an inventory, but it barely comes into play. Spaces you can move to appear as floating triangles, and spots that you can interact with have floating stars, making it easy to navigate the world and find the next flag to trip.
The story is fully linear. There aren't any sort of choices or deductive mechanics or anything. You just walk around, letting the other characters solve the case. (The protagonist's encounter with Kamui has left him mute, which is a cute play on the "silent protagonist" trope but does not make for a compelling character.)
You'd think a game that's linear and has no gameplay would live or die based on its characters and story, but... well, I think I've already tipped my hand here.
I feel like the characters are probably fine, but I can only see them through frosted glass. Outside of CGs, all characters get is a single, static portrait icon. (Alright, some major characters get two icons.) Even in the game world, the character icon will just float on the side of the screen when you're on the same spot as that character. So there's minimal visual representation of the characters, and naturally there's no voice acting in the game.
So all we have is dialogue. Dialogue is all well and good, but it doesn't quite feel like enough without supplemental visuals. It's like communicating with people in chatrooms and other text-based media online. You can get a pretty good idea of what someone is like, but it's tougher without facial expressions or body language, and the lack of vocal tone can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and confusion. On top of that, screentime feels like it's spread a bit thinly among the characters. The game isn't that long, but there are six other members of the Heinous Crimes Unit. It's difficult to give each of them their time to shine, especially when balancing the plot and chapter-specific characters.
The characters weren't bad, but just getting a few conversations with each wasn't enough to get me to like them. I never felt like I could get a good grasp on any of them, and as a result I never became invested in any of them.
That leaves the plot, which unfortunately doesn't fare much better. The beginning starts off... okay. Some things are strange (they discuss crime as it if were a communicable disease), and some details of the case don't seem to add up, and we don't get to actually deduce anything or solve it ourselves, but it does some interesting things and has some fun scenes, so that's okay, right?
And things continue along like that, not great but fine enough, until we get to the second half of the game, when it just implodes. The game decides it doesn't need to explain things anymore, and then reveals conspiracy after conspiracy after conspiracy after conspiracy. By the end of the game I had no idea who anybody was, what anybody was trying to do, what we did, what the conflict was, what happened... pretty much anything. If you walk away understanding nothing, then was there any value in the experience?
I typically crave closure, but that doesn't mean I always need a clear-cut plot. I loved Flower, Sun, and Rain (the game's sequel!) and Revolutionary Girl Utena! Both of those are surrealist messes as well—but have much more robust, well-developed characters, as well as plots that are more comprehensible at a basic level. The Silver Case, with its frosted glass characters and wholly incoherent plot, just doesn't stack up.
I'm being a bit overly harsh, since it's not until the second half that the game devolves, but I don't think the cases leading up to that are good enough to justify the mess at the end.
There's also a bit of irony in the fact that, due to difficulties in translating certain passages, what's probably the sole legitimately clever component of the original game is the most bizarre part of the English translation.
I do have to give the game credit, though: it's got style. Does the style make up for the characters and plot? Absolutely not. But it's still stylish.
The game assets show up like "windows" over the game background, and... that doesn't sound like much, but hear me out. Most games have a set UI, for instance, a background with sprites on the top half and a text box on the bottom half. The Silver Case doesn't have that. It just has windows—but there's no set number or configuration of those windows. The windows will move, resize, appear, disappear, multiply, etc. as needed. This results in a dynamic, flexible style that can turn the presentation itself into a part of the storytelling. On top of that, the background and visual theme changes from chapter to chapter, resulting in different moods and atmospheres.
By the way, the stuff I discussed with the Heinous Crimes Unit is just half the game. Each chapter with the Heinous Crimes Unit is labeled "Transmitter," and has a corresponding "Placebo" chapter that follows Tokio Morishima, a freelance journalist, as he investigates the same crimes. The Placebo chapters provide an alternate viewpoint to the cases presented in the Transmitter chapters (and sometimes even the solution). Completing a Transmitter chapter unlocks the corresponding Placebo, and the intent is to alternate between Transmitter and Placebo but there's nothing stopping you from saving all the Placebo chapters until the end.
Anyway, I bring this up because the Placebo chapters have their own separate art style from the Transmitter chapters. It seems clear to me that a lot of care and attention was spent crafting The Silver Case's aesthetic direction. If only the story could match....
The soundtrack is also pretty chill, with smooth, jazzy synths perfectly complementing the techno mysteries.
I also have to give The Silver Case credit for the fact that, despite all its weirdness, it's impressively prescient for a game initially released in 1999 about how the internet would develop and become a part of society.
Still, it just isn't the game for me. I'll freely admit that I didn't "get" it. If you're looking for detective fiction or a tight, logical story, The Silver Case doesn't provide that. If you just want an oddball narrative that you can immerse yourself and get lost in, The Silver Case might be more up your alley.
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