The good:
- Engrossing story and worldbuilding
- The rabbit holes you come across in these investigations are compelling and engaging. It almost feels like a wiki walk, in a good way.
- It's immensely satisfying to find the one or two relevant video recordings in a sea of potential dates by applying logic and information gotten through other clues.
- Using the car rental database from case 1 to solve a puzzle in case 3 was brilliant!
- Side questions are cool and very rewarding. They also provide a reason to revisit old cases.
- Almost every character in the game is connected, and so are the cases and the locations themselves. It makes the world of CaseCracker feel alive.
- The case report system is a definite improvement over the traditional "pick one answer from a group of three/four" seen in most detective games. There are many more possibilities, and that forces the player to think and understand the case.
- There were a lot of excellent and brilliant twists.
- Interesting premises and obstacles. It's so cool to identify the victim of case 4.
- The existence of Jiao Bin as a whole. I love this character.
- Some out-of-game stuff is clever and very creative, like finding the HQ of Black Robe Inc. Keyword "some", because other examples are stupid.
The bad:
- The name of the killer in Case 2 is spoiled by the question about the alibi. It was as simple as replacing the name with "the killer" (and this is done in later cases, so I don't know why it wasn't done here). Edit: Later, I read on a Steam guide that this question is unlocked by "filling in [spoiler]Xin Youwei[/spoiler] as the killer", but I'm not sure if this means it unlocks as soon as you drop his name on the killer box or if you send the report without fully filling it out first (or if you do fill everything out but get an answer wrong). If it unlocks as soon as you drop his name on the killer box, that's bad design because the player could just drop random names as they theorize and guess, and accidentally spoil themselves if they scroll down.
- The player can accidentally access evidence before they are supposed to. In my experience, I searched "log" after reading about Liu Wei's murder because I thought there might have been a log of people who entered the duty office in Sky Electrical, but what I got was a clue you're supposed to obtain only after cracking the password in Sphinx. The ideal solution would be to write code that prevents the player from searching clues that are mentioned after an action (like cracking a password).
- Sometimes, when reading a new clue, you can see the dialogue of a character who had a copy of the clue hidden in their house, even if their house has not been searched yet. It happens with the VAM Agreement, for example. This is an obvious spoiler. Like I said in the previous paragraph, code should be implemented to prevent the player from seeing things too early.
- The in-game notepad doesn't automatically send a word to the next line when you reach the end of the current line. This is a super basic feature that I expect in any software (video game or not) that provides a way to type notes. Having to go back and untype part of a word because you realize it doesn't fit in that line wastes a lot of time, is infinitely annoying, and breaks the flow of thought.
- There are very few songs in the game. They are good, but any song eventually becomes annoying when you hear it too many times. These were licensed through Creative Commons, meaning they are free and quick to implement, so there is no excuse. There should be at least five more songs to keep things varied and from getting stale (especially in case 1, which only has like four songs).
- The updated translation to English still has some issues, even though it's better than the original (which I used when playing the demo in February 2026):
1. It uses unfitting words like "procuratorate", "biological deceased", "social-identity deceased", and "canvassing".
2. Sometimes characters say the wrong gender, like Chen Liang in the clue Li Jianjun, where he says "I've met his father" instead of "her father" (Li Yiying's). Also in case 1 when the Search Warrant section of Zhang Yanhong's profile says her real estate has been inherited by "his son". And when Junyan's ex boyfriend says "Sister Yao" even though Yao Yu is a man.
3. The "where the rivers meet" riddle doesn't make sense in English.
4. More potential issues in the following paragraphs.
- 404's identity is absurdly hidden, and it requires knowledge of Chinese culture (the year of the rat/mouse). No one can figure this out. What inevitably happens is that you make a blind guess and the game then tells you the answer straight in the "In-depth investigation" files. Not satisfying at all.
- The hint system makes it possible to waste detective points when one hint isn't enough to help you and you ask for another (which is the exact same). It should be programmed so that the same hint doesn't cost any additional points; or alternatively, prevent the player from triggering the hint purchase when they already paid for it.
- We were told that the Sunliner sedan smashed a tree and made it fall, but the killer doesn't mention anything about this. I thought there was some purpose, but maybe he's just a bad driver? Terrible driver, if he hit that tree so hard unintentionally. I imagine this was done to give a clue to the player that the killer used a car near the river, but it feels cheap in hindsight.
- Help text in the action menus tends to go offscreen, making it impossible to read it all. An example is Photo in case 2: the help text says "Pinpointing the filming location and floor level may help identify the".
- After beating the game, I still don't know if the dots beneath the chapter names in Infiltration were made by Junting or Junyan. Junting's dialogue doesn't clarify - might be a translation issue again.
- Jiao Bin's profile in Case 1 says he got the security guard job at the Raceway one year ago, but the same profile in Case 3 says it happened two years ago. Which one is it?
- Case 2 accepts the personnel files as the method by which the killer obtained crucial information about the victim. However, Case 4 does not accept the orphan files for the same purpose, instead asking for the source of the information. Inconsistent standards.
- Case 1 says the explosion in Mt. Urn happened on July 16, 2019, while the clue Sol in Case 3 says it happened on July 17, 2020. Also, the In-depth Investigation text about the puzzles says the police found Sol on July 18, even though it was the 17th (the day after the explosion, which happened on the 16th).
- Jia Huasheng's advice sometimes doesn't line up with the actual names of the features she explains. For example, in case 2 she says to use "Info Search" if you're trying to pick out one clue from a pile, but the feature is called "Search Existing Information". This is only one example of many that can confuse the player. I assume this is probably a localization issue of consistency.
- There is no hint in the game that spells out the name of the mathematician who died in a duel. It requires sinking time in the internet looking for famous French mathematicians. Additionally, the "life formula" mentioned by Wang Feng shows no relevant results in real life, so I suspect that's a mistranslation.
- Ol' Ge's diaries should use more paragraphs. Right now they are uninviting walls of text.
- It would be nice if photos showed actual photos to the player instead of being described with text. This was rectified in CaseCracker2, but still exists as a minor problem in this game.
- No window should appear when you hover over a clue that doesn't have excerpts. Seeing "this clue does not have an excerpt yet" on every clue you hover over is distracting.
