A special thank you to NIS America for providing us a review copy of this game.
With Grasshopper Manufactures next big title, No More Heroes 3, out this week, I wanted to try out some of the company’s other works, especially those from Goichi Suda, or as most know him: SUDA 51. I’ve played through the previous No More Heroes games and even played Shadows of the Damned but the developer has several other games under his belt and this includes several visual novels. Of particular acclaim is The Silver Case, a PlayStation visual novel which was recently brought to Nintendo Switch alongside its sequel The 25th Ward: The Silver Case, being sold as a double pack by NIS America who were kind enough to send us a copy of the game to review. For full transparency, I am only going to be reviewing the first game as I want to take a break between it and its sequel and they are quite different, partially because The 25th Ward was designed for mobile first.
This wasn’t the first adventure game by Suda but it is one of his most acclaimed, so as a fan of many of his more action-oriented titles, how has his take on the visual novel genre held up? Pretty well actually, at least in some places, and a bit dated in others. Let’s start with what I liked.
This game screams style in a way that I think only SUDA 51 can pull off. The game uses a mixture of visual and audio styles to get across the story it wants to tell, with dynamically changing windows into the game’s world atop a background that manages to look both 90s tech inspired and like a Windows XP wallpaper. Almost all the text is displayed as if being typed up in ASCII on an old computer with satisfyingly ‘clicky’ sfx to accompany it.
The presentation is really the stand-out for me in this game. It just has such a strong sense of style behind it. It’s a game that can’t have a simple chapter select and instead has a record player / radio where selecting a chapter gives the impression of playing a previous recording of an old police case.
Equally stylistic is the use of several visual styles to get across this games world and characters – even using FMVs of actual people when it is effective. The environments and objects in the world are displayed in full 3D whereas character portraits and images are in 2D. The style even changes between scenarios, appearing full colour during the ‘Transparency’ plotline and in a more-rough, black and blue, art style for the ‘Placebo’ plotline. It’s almost like this is how the player characters are seeing their respective world.
And let me talk about the split scenario idea as it is quite interesting. Under the Transparency line of stories, you play the role of a detective solving a series of murders – working with Heinous Crimes Unit (HCU) of the 24 Wards Police Department. You work alongside a cast of suitably hard-boiled detectives that you might expect from police dramas of the time, such as the really laid-back detective who appears lazy but is actually great at his job, the female detective who’s trying to make a name for herself as the only lady on staff and a ‘takes-no-bullshit’, bad tempered, veteran. Each one is brimming with personality and has their own storylines that exist outside of the specific narrative that your player character exists on.
In the Placebo scenario though, things are very different. Here, you actually play as a named character called Tokio, a freelance crimes journalist who has been hired by a mysterious client to investigate the same cases that you work on during the Transparency scenarios. These chapters are unlocked after you beat their Transparency counter-parts and offer a lot more insight into the cases. It provides some context to some points that are kind of glossed over in the other scenario.
As a word of advice, I would recommend that you do both routes simultaneously instead of one after another. You’ll enjoy the story a lot more that way and elements of both scenarios crossover at points, which helps to heighten the overarching mystery of the game. As this game is weird at times. Weird in a way that only Grasshopper Manufacture manages to pull off. And I like that. It provided a different feeling detective game from the likes of Hotel Dusk and Famicom Detective Club. It’s a different vibe entirely.
But it’s not all good. Whereas I jived with the presentation and style this game presents, its gameplay can feel very repetitive at times and there are some story-beats that feel just a bit too long in hindsight. I know it can add to the atmosphere and build up the background for certain characters but when you sit through a 10-15 minute cut scene of a kid naming off all the other kids he doesn’t like and why, only to have none of it ever matter in the long-run, it does make you question why you wasted your time.
And I’ll be transparent here, visual novels are not my favourite genre. I need a level of interactivity with the game in order to enjoy my time with it. Games like the Fate series where you stare at static PNGs on a JPEG background as text fills the screen just doesn’t do it for me. Thankfully, The Silver Case isn’t like that at all but what interactivity it does have can feel very longwinded and aggravating at points.
The main gameplay in this title, other than reading text, is walking through the 3D environments and interacting with objects and people. You can also use items when appropriate, and it adds a level of interactivity that is good. The best thing I can compare it to is a first-person dungeon crawler like the Etrian Odyssey series. But the puzzles are either way too easy or way too cryptic. A puzzle where you have to decode a password will appear and while you could add all the numbers manually, you can also just press the search button and have the password automatically installed. I don’t know if this is a quirk of this remake or not to make it simpler, but in practice it removes the point of having a puzzle entirely.
On the other hand, some puzzles are really just flag raising events. You might need to get a key from an apartment manager and he isn’t at home. So instead you have to go to every apartment until you find one where the resident tells you that the manager should be in his own flat. And now, he suddenly will be. There’s not really a puzzle here or indication that this is the solution.
This particular puzzle highlights another issue with this game and that is how tedious it can sometimes be. When exploring the earlier mentioned apartment building, you have to watch a cut scene transitioning the player from one floor to the other, a cut scene which is longer than it actually takes to get from one floor to the next in gameplay. It feels like padding and is unnecessary.
This issue also bogs down the ‘Placebo’ storyline quite a lot, as 95% of your actions will inform Tokio getting out of bed, walking over to his computer, checking his emails, then writing in his diary. Rinse and repeat. Nothing changes about this, there is rarely anything else the player does. You just walk two steps to the computer and interact with it. It gets incredibly tiring and even more frustrating because of what you don’t do.
There are many times where Tokio will make a decision to investigate something only for the investigation to be skipped over and the player informed via Tokio making notes in his personal diary. It seems the game deems it unimportant to show the player his investigation and just tell you about it afterwards, but thinks it is vital that you walk the exact same two steps 100 times per chapter. At this point, I would almost rather there was no interaction from the player at all.
All in all, The Silver Case is an interesting look at a relic of Grasshopper Manufactures past. As far as visual novels go, it is more interesting than most and has a unique style to it all its own but you can tell that this is a game of a bygone era. I can deal with the 3D graphics looking like they are from the PlayStation era but some repetitive gameplay segments, a lack of challenge and even tiny missing quality-of-life features (like the ability to look back at text you may have missed) bring the game down. If you are into visual novels, I do recommend it and if you are a huge fan of SUDA51 the quirky charm of his direction and writing will likely keep you engaged but otherwise it may feel a tad dated to play.
It’s a game that I would certainly give a silver rating.
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