Skarvik: Detective Casework

Skarvik, northern Norway. Eighteen hundred people, a ferry five times a day, and a salmon farm that feeds them all.

Saturday, six in the morning. A body at pile 14 in the harbor. Jonas Wik, fisherman. The one who swam across the fjord three times. The station chief will write "accident" before lunch, and the town will agree. You are in your first week on the job, with a case file, a board, and five days to read the papers more carefully than everyone else.

A DETECTIVE GAME ABOUT READING No hidden-object hunts, no timers. You talk to people, collect reports, statements, receipts, logs, and notes into the case file, and read them as real documents: Norwegian police forms with the hero's handwritten translation, a bar's register tape, a tide table, the ferry terminal's camera log, pages from a notebook. The key line is never the first one.

THE BOARD Highlight the lines that seem important, then set two documents against each other on the board. If the highlighted lines contradict each other, that's a deduction. Deductions can be shown to people, and conversations change. The board doesn't read for you: with nothing highlighted, it stays silent.

FIVE DAYS, FIVE GATES Every day ends in a conversation with the station chief, and he has a real objection to every point you make. To close the day, you need deductions he can't argue away. Witnesses lie, but a lie is always caught by a document, never by pressure.

PUZZLES Fifteen puzzles built from the documents: work out a blood alcohol level from a register tape and a memo, use the tide table to find where a man fell in, reconcile a farm's weekly reports, rebuild the night minute by minute from a camera log and a neighbor's statement. A hint after the first miss, a full explanation after the third. You can't skip them, and you can't get stuck.

A TOWN THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING BY EVENING A station chief who has watched drunks fall off piers for thirty years. A sergeant married to the sister of the farm owner's wife. A bartender who takes keys away from drunks. An old fisherman with a tide table on his wall and a paper he'll only hand to the one who asks the right way. A neighbor who doesn't sleep at night. Forty-two jobs, and every one of them has a family.

ALSO • Eleven locations, fifteen characters, forty-three documents. • A hiding place not everyone finds. • The accusation: with five deductions on the board, the chief asks "Who?", and a wrong name costs you composure. • A hundred-point rating and four ranks, from rookie fresh out of the academy to the one who asked the right way. A "what you missed" screen for a second playthrough. • English and Russian.