A crime has been committed in the village, and it is yours to solve. There are no ready-made lines here: you think up the questions yourself, and the villagers answer as living people would — each with a character of their own and their own memory of that night.
A dark detective story: three cases of the five investigate a death, and two more a theft and a man's disappearance. There are no scenes of violence on screen — everything is known from what the villagers say.
«Three days now without sleep: the yard is full from daybreak, and every man with a truth of his own, and truth with none of them»
Elder Maro · the case of the vanishing at the crossing
See for yourself
No combat, no loot. A village, its secret, and people in no hurry to answer.
Frames
Cases
Different crimes, different places, different people — and one shared world: the Principality of Olshan, where everything is already linked. A new case does not cancel the old ones: it brings new villagers and writes the history further. It suits those who prefer conversation to a chase — reading between the lines, catching what does not add up, and working the rest out for themselves.
A few nights ago fire broke out at the old mill. In the house beside it lay Maren, the miller's wife, sick abed: she could no longer rise, and she never came out of the flames. There is one death in this village, and the guilt for it lies on whoever set the mill alight.
free
The wedding feast thundered in the tavern well into the night — until one of the guests, having drunk his wine, gave a rattle and pitched face-down into the scraps. The ale was still foaming in the mugs while the guest was already going cold on the floor. Everyone ladled the wine from one cask, all night, the whole company — and no one else was taken. Why, out of all that table, did he alone die?
Between vespers and matins a silver reliquary holding a saint's relics vanished from a locked chapel — and the chapel stands locked as it stood: the window whole, the door untouched. The keys can be counted on one hand, and every one of them is where it should be, with people the village is used to trusting.
Barnava the travelling merchant, called Purse, was lost at the crossing in the very dusk — he stepped into the fog by the water and never came out. His horse and his abandoned goods were found on the far bank, and of the body there is no sign at all: not in the reeds, not at the ford, not downstream.
A man was found on the pasture at the very edge of the forest — his throat torn to rags, the grass beneath him black with dried blood, and his eyes fixed for good on an indifferent sky. Sheep had been slashed before him too — not every night and to no pattern — and the shepherds crossed themselves at every rustle beyond the fence. A lone wolf, cast out of its pack? Or did someone with human hands and a purpose worse than any beast's take a beast for a cover?
What you have to work with
No fighting, no lockpicks, no searching. «Truth here rests on the tongue and on the memory» — there is nowhere else to get it.
Whom to ask and about what is yours to decide. The villager answers in their own words and in their own character.
Everyone has something they keep quiet about: another's secret, an old grievance, a small sin of their own. Ask the right way and a person says more than they meant to.
Every case has several false trails: many will have a reason, several will have had the chance. Only one is guilty — and only on him do reason, chance and means come together at once. Get the village talking and he shows through of himself.
Every testimony goes into the notebook, every connection onto the investigation chart. You will not have to keep in your head who said what.
Alone or together
You can investigate alone: solo play is not cut down in any way. Or you can call your friends — spread out through the village, each get their own villager talking, and come back together to compare what everyone heard. Deciding whom to believe is better done together.
Send your friend a link and they are already in your village. No lobby, no signing up for someone else's service. You can call them in halfway through a case.
You walk the same map and see where everyone has gone. You can split up and question different villagers at the same time.
What one of you draws out, all of you see. The accusation is shared too: anyone may name a name, but the others have fifteen seconds to stop it. The attempt is one for all of you — so come to an agreement.
Mana is spent by whoever asked the question. Your stock is yours alone: your friend's curiosity costs you nothing.
The world
This world counts its years its own way, and has its own faith, its own money and its own justice. Time here is measured not by a number but by a misfortune: «in the lean year», «when the pestilence walked», «the spring after the fire». That history is written further with every new case — and no case cancels the ones before it.
The year and the reckoning of years, the crown, the faith, the roads, the money, the guilds and the courts, the hidden art, the past and the people's memory. You cannot read it all at one sitting — it is dug out.
A war on the far frontier reaches the village as tax arrears. Behind a cry of «witch!» there is more often not a devil but envy and debt. Pull one thread and the whole cloth moves.
There is no «encyclopedia» button here: the world opens only through people. The shepherd will tell you about the village, the scribe about the prince's charters, the herbwife about what is not spoken of aloud. Nobody holds the whole picture.
The villagers
Trade, manner, what they are proud of and what they are ashamed of, whom they trust and whom they keep away from — all of it was written before you knocked. That is why one will open up, another will dig his heels in, and a third will show you the door.
Executioner
«We'll not name my trade — you know it well enough. Don't hold it against me if I keep quiet: words come dear to me these days.»
He took the trade from his father — did not choose it but received it, the way one receives a maiming: silently, all at once and for good. His hands know one kind of work and one more besides — pottering in the garden: he loosens the beds, ties up the peas, feeds the hens from his palm, as though begging the earth's pardon for what he does in the square.
He wants one thing: that someone should give him a hand without flinching, sit at table with him and call him by his name and not by his trade. And he fears that over long service he has lost the right to it.
Witch of the bog
«Morvena they call me — and some don't call me at all, only whisper it in the dark. Come to me in need and I'll help; come to me with malice and I'll help too, my dear... only you'll not care for the help.»
She was born not on the bog but in a crowded place — and learned early that the crowded place did not want her. She attached herself to an old herbwife on the marshy edge, carried her brushwood and water, and in return took over which herb brings life, which kills, and what is to be whispered over which water.
With the strong she is sweet and evasive, with the weak deliberately rough — so that nobody grows attached and makes out the living creature under the scab. Her pride is that they fear her; her shame is that under all that fear she is far softer than she ought to be.
Witcher, slayer of foul things
«They call me when something howls in the forest that neither pitchfork nor prayer will touch. Payment in advance, and expect no idle questions.»
As a child he was led away from the yard and given to a trade that maims on purpose: they gave him bitter draughts, broke him and set him again, until they had burned out his fear and half his human warmth with it. His hair went grey while other lads were only starting a beard.
He sleeps with one eye open and his back to the wall; he sits by the fire and whets his blade — that is his prayer. He wants to live to a quiet old age by a hearth, and does not himself believe such a lot is written for him.
Alchemist
«I measure out poison and remedy with the same measure — the whole difference is the dose. Bring me an illness or an order, and we shall settle by weight.»
She grew up at another's workshop, where they took her in as an orphan to work the bellows and carry out the ash — not out of charity but because a child costs less than a workman. Her master taught not with speech but with a ruler across the fingers: a wrong measure earned a blow, a right one a nod. So she learned by heart that there is nothing more trustworthy than a number.
«Everything rots,» she says drily, «the whole argument is the dose and the time.» What she has lost is the steadiness of her hand — and so the dawn is no joy to her now but a reproach.
Mage, reader of stars
«I read by the stars, interpret dreams, and mend what is beyond the physicians and the priests. To you — simply a mage; to those who know — a great deal more.»
He came from the family of a shabby apothecary, where he overheard his father promising the sick a miracle behind a screen and weighing out chalk with powdered charcoal — and worked out early that a buyer's faith is worth more than the remedy. Talent was measured out to him sparingly; the shortfall he made up with quick fingers and star tables learned by heart.
«The crowd pays not for truth but for a shiver,» he tells himself. He dreams of a chair in a great city, and fears worse than death meeting the one who will see at a glance where the learning ends and the market trick begins.
Butcher
«Fresh meat for one, a soup bone for another — and for some the truth to their face, if they ask for it.»
She came to the block as a girl, in the year when there was no hand left in the house to hold a cleaver: her mother wailed over the cooling counter until the daughter silently picked up the dropped blade and finished the half-butchered carcass.
She wants her trade honoured without allowance and without a smirk. She fears the day her hand falters mid-stroke — and so she whets the cleaver longer than she needs to and tries the edge against her nail three times over.
Captain of the guard
«Captain to you, and nothing else. I hold the gate, the night and the order in this little town as long as I stand on my feet.»
She rose from the common spearmen — not by birth and not by money, but by calluses and years of night watches. She began as a girl running errands at the gate, then begged the sergeant for a shaft of her own — and never let it go until the captain's chain.
She holds to the regulations harder than she believes in them: without them she is, as she knows herself, «a woman at the gate whom anyone is free to send home to the stove». She pities a recruit on his first watch on the sly — and is more ashamed of that kindness than of any offence.
Thief and sharper
«I stole nothing, I found it all — and what a man finds, you might say, came to his hands of itself.»
He grew up an orphan by the high road and fed on whatever his quick fingers picked up. His trade was taught by hunger and by cuffs from older thieves: he learned to walk without a sound, to read people by their eyes, and to talk so smoothly that you listen — while your purse grows lighter of its own accord.
He is proud of never once having used a knife: he takes by charm and by skill. And he is ashamed that he has sworn to give it up a hundred times and a hundred times lied to himself.
Fortune-teller
«Sit down, my dear, give me your hand: I shall tell you things about yourself you never knew were there.»
An old fortune-teller picked her up as a stray girl with a wagon train — and passed her the trade: not to read the wax but the people. Where a lip trembled, where a glance darted aside, where a finger slipped into a sleeve of itself — out of those signs she builds her «I see, I see».
«Everyone is their own book and their own riddle,» she says, «and I only turn the page.» Over her years on the road she has lost count of the faces she lied to, and at times it seems to her that she has given away her own face piece by piece.
Undertaker
«Don't be frightened — mine is a quiet trade: in his own hour I make each man's bed in oak and see him off, so that he lies easy.»
The trade came from his father, and to him from his grandfather; as a boy he fell asleep to the rustle of a plane. It bent him early: in one bad year he built with his own hands the coffins of those he loved more than life. Since then he does not weep — he planes.
The living give him a wide berth and cross themselves behind his back — and so he is alone among the very people he wishes nothing but peace. Bitterest of all is the habit he cannot break: he measures every man he meets by eye, across the shoulders and by height, reckoning the boards.
Instructions for the case
Questions for the investigation
Starting is free: every player arrives with a stock of Mana, and it is enough for the first case. When the Mana runs out your investigator «falls asleep»; more comes in packages.
Only a browser. There is nothing to download or install — press «Start the investigation» and go.
Each case is a complete investigation with its own cast of villagers and its own ending. The full list is always on the «Cases» page: it builds itself, so it never goes stale. New cases come into the same world — to people you already know, and with new faces. The first case is free.
The in-game resource of conversation: every line you speak spends it. Mana is not money — it cannot be withdrawn, exchanged or passed to another player. It is both a resource and a part of the atmosphere of an impoverished world.
The guards take the innocent one out of the village, and you can no longer speak with him — the testimony he never gave leaves with him. That does not make the case unsolvable: it can still be closed without him. But you have only three accusations: spend them all and the case stays unsolved.
There are hints: a hint names your next question — whom to go to and what to ask — but it does not open the clue for you; the asking is still yours. The first is cheap, and each one after it costs more than the last in that game.
Yes. A villager answers in his own words, in his own character, and with his own reasons for holding something back. But the truth is not his to decide: the clues and the culprit were set by the case's author long before you arrived, and your accusation is checked against them.
Yes. A party is one to six people: you send a link, your friend follows it, and the village, the notebook and the accusation are shared. You can call someone in halfway through a case. Solo play is not cut down in any way.
Russian and English. The language of this page switches at the top, the language of the game in your account settings. The villagers answer in the language of the party: it is chosen when the party is created and does not change mid-case.
The first case is free. After that it is yours to decide: alone, or with friends you call in.
Start the investigation