Are you a keen detective? See yourself as more of a Sherlock Holmes than his trusty sidekick, Watson? Love getting stuck into a good murder mystery and figuring out who the culprit is with evidence given prior? The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is a live-action mystery solver. Developed and published by Square Enix, this game was released on Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and PC on the 12th of May.

The Shijima family are the protectors of the tokijiku fruit. This fruit is a secret to longevity, and as so, is highly sought after. While protecting the fruit of youth there have been multiple mysterious deaths within the family spanning over the last century. The main protagonist of this story is an up-and-coming mystery writer Haruka Kagami. She is sought out by Eiji Shijima, a friend who aids her mystery novel writing, to help get to the bottom of the mysterious human remains found on the Shijima property.

The gameplay is simple; watch the scenes unravel and look out for clues. Every now and then you will be prompted to make a dialogue choice. Some choices seem pointless and you end up being backtracked to the same prompt. After the story has unfolded, you enter a reasoning phase, where all of the evidence is presented to you. The cognitive phase is a particular area where you can put together all clues and mysteries to create multiple hypotheses and discover the truths of the mysteries in the solution phase, and the solution phase is where you use your hypothesis and attempt to unravel the mystery to its full extent.

I did find this phase to be a bit guided because upon making a false claim, you can have a revelation, and this will return you to the reasoning phase where you can look back over any evidence and hypothesis discovered. The downside here is that returning to the solution phase, either to make the one correct prompt choice or another incorrect choice, you’ll have to go back over this entire drawn-out process again.

The story is very in-depth, highly dramatic, and will draw you in for hours. The videography on the switch screen was superb. I easily felt like I was watching a crime series on Netflix. That was until I had to make the prompt choices which didn’t seem like they were very diverse. One option would be an obvious choice, whereas the other would be extremely similar. They weren’t polar opposites and felt like I was being guided down a specific pathway.

Aside from the story and cinematography, the audio was highly immersive. The music and effect audio was full of mystery and deceit in itself, but the English audio dub didn’t feel like it fit the game very well. It almost felt like a badly dubbed movie, but it was bearable. If you want to experience the game to its fullest, however, I would highly recommend an audio set to Japanese with subtitles, unless you can understand Japanese that is. With the Japanese voices, the game felt a lot more authentic, and it’s not about the mismatched words and mouth movements.

The game was obviously recorded in Japanese but the English dub feels overly manufactured and digital, like an obvious copy-paste on top. If you don’t speak or read English or Japanese, I am sorry but you will not be able to enjoy this mysterious story-driven detective game. As of now, there are only two languages available in-game. You also cannot change the audio language during gameplay either, you have to quit to the menu to make the changes. The option is there, but it’s just not selectable.

If you are into detective games and want to get your Sherlock Holmes vibe on, I highly recommend checking this one out. The developers state that there are between 40 and 50 hours of gameplay spread across 4 separate cases. Despite the awfully guided pathways, the story and all its drama are very immersive and had me enthralled for hours.

Featuring a lot of supernatural themes and great acting, it could easily rival your current favorite TV show. While the English dub felt off, it didn’t destroy the game and if you can’t be bothered to read subtitles, then it is still a solid audio choice. The game is starting at $80, and given the 40-50 hours of gameplay, it is a reasonable price, although slightly on the high side. I recommend this game and if it comes on sale you should jump at the chance to own it.

Written by: Bigfoot