The Silver Case is a HD remaster of a PlayStation game. It is a visual novel and the original was only available in Japan. It was then remastered, translated, and released on PC and PS4. Developed by Suda51, it was the first game of his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture. Being a visual novel, the gameplay is limited. Unlike other visual novels, there are no dialogue choices, nor are there multiple endings. This makes its linear story the major draw and doesn’t distract you with “what ifs”.
You can toggle between the remastered visuals and original visuals. The original visuals have been touched up and still look good on a HD screen. Since it’s a visual novel, the graphics have aged well, even if the gameplay has not. The game has weird controls all round. When you are in control of the character, which plays in a first person view, there is a menu wheel. You use the wheel to select whether you want to move, interact with an object, use an implement, or pull up the system menu. If you want to move, then you select it and use the D-pad to move on square at a time. The implement option is rarely used and thus easy to forget it is there which may cause you to be stuck in a few sections.
Figuring out how to progress the story can be confusing since the graphics are simple so you may not know where you need to go, what you need to get or find to trigger the next cutscene. There are light puzzles based on text and numbers. They are simple but painful and tedious. However, you can cheat you way through if you want to skip them. The game will automatically select the answer and progress the game. The story is told through static images, rendered cutscenes, live-action footage, and text dialogue. This mix of various types of aesthetics is unique and messy at the same time. It ultimately becomes inconsistent. The live-action and pre-rendered cutscenes are only upscaled, so they look fuzzy.
The game is set in a city called 24 Wards, where there are 24 districts. It’s very confusing at the beginning. You seem to take on a character who doesn’t explicitly speak but is assumed to have done so since other characters answer. You seem to only be there to observe. You’re a newbie in the investigation team, limited background knowledge is provided. All you know is that there is a murderer, you find dead bodies, and they have mental issues.
The game is split into various cases and they are each different but are ultimately all linked in the end. Each has subarcs that continue beyond the case it’s in. In the first murder case, you find out that the culprit is soon revealed to be Kamui Uehara, but the rest of the game has you trying to catch him. There is a big revelation at the end… which is not that surprising. You would have suspected something from the very beginning. The game predominantly takes place in the night and in dark places. It can feel too dark and depressing, merging supernatural elements along with kidnapping and murders. The game feels too bizarre and incoherent to be truly enjoyable, or comprehensible. For a visual novel, the story isn’t actually that good. There’s a lot of swearing where it doesn’t add to the experience.
The main portion takes around five to ten hours but there is a second viewpoint. This alternate viewpoint has even less gameplay and what little there is is very repetitive. It can be a chore and a slog to get through in the beginning. What makes it infuriating is the game’s insistence on spending seconds every new scene on repeating the location, time and day, even if you were in the same location literally a second ago. The alternate viewpoint gets better after the first two cases (which are basically summaries of the main route) as it spins into its own thing.
Brand new for the remaster is the addition of a new prologue for the sequel. It’s nothing to get excited about since it’s only ten minutes long… Overall, The Silver Case is hard to recommend. The story is not that engrossing and the gameplay has not aged well at all. It is a terrible slog and incomprehensible at times. There are better visual novels out there.
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