"It totally works for the red-string-corkboard I call a brain"

THE SILVER CASE sees me well on my way to reading more in 2025

- JESS KINGHORN

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “A visual novel awarded a score of only 50%? Oof.” But I knew I was onto a winner from the very first word. I wasn’t the only one, either; my mom often falls asleep when I’m showing her a new game, but for Grasshopper Manufacture’s debut thriller, she stayed awake.

Debuting on the original PlayStation as a Japan-exclusive in 1999, The Silver Case was remastered, re-released, and finally localized for English-speaking PC Gamers back in 2016. To be fair to the contemporaneous review, it has definitely not aged gracefully in a number of ways. The clunky movement is bad enough, but exploration also requires you to mode shift before you can interact with anything; it takes far too many button presses to do something as straightforward as read a document or answer a ringing phone.