“Casebook Episode 0” Game Review
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I’m a huge “Law and Order” fan. So I guess that means I like police procedurals. I guess there’s something about going to some crime scene and trying to fit things together like a huge puzzle.
There have been a lot of attempts to replicate this formula in games. Law and Order has it’s own computer games. CSI and even “Cold Case” has at least one game apiece. But they all royally sucked for various reasons. A ton of money to buy into the franchise. Then all that time and effort to get the original casts’ voices (Plus digitizing their faces), and somehow, it all falls apart.
The voice acting comes across flat. The writing is terrible. The game feels like it’s still in the Beta stage. Et al.

Personally, I think the last game out there that even came close to replicating the investigative experience was Seirra’s original “olice Quest” and that was over ten years ago. That was before I came across Casebook.

I came across this game by accident. “Episode 0” is a free demo, feeling like a “roof of concept” to show the technology used and how effective it is. The game has the player (you) as the unnamed/unseen partner of a police detective. Who is called to visit some elderly, eccentric relatives to solve a “Case”. Only the detective talks to you as you watch him speak to the relatives in solving a mystery.

The mystery is that a relative is missing (Actually, it’s a funeral urn. But I guess it still counts.) and the detective is called in to find him. It’s something of a family favor and the player is asked to tag along. Through the process of elimination, only one room has not been searched and that’s your crime scene to sift though.

Ten years ago, Fox Television did a series of something similar. (The name escapes me, sadly) The camera was the eyes of a police detective’s partner who never speaks. Through these “eyes”, we see the detective speak to witnesses and suspects, run through evidence, and ask us who the perps are.
It was a bold experiment, and something that only Fox would dare to take. Sadly, I think it must’ve been too radical for mainstream. I don’t think it survive even half a season.

You go to the scene and gather evidence with a camera, taking pictures. Then processing them and shifting through the evidence that way. Through the scanned photos, you dust for prints, process DNA and other stuff. The mini-games are simple enough. And there is even one sequence where you have to focus, via a slider, a microscope to find a vital clue.

There are a few red herrings scattered about, and sometimes the detective offers some colorful commentary about a few of the pictures taken. Which just adds a bit more characterization and depth to the game. I spent some extra time just taking pictures, wondering what the next comment will be. Like the one involving a skull, for example.

The scenes are shot in FMV (Full Motion Video), a rarity these days. But the acting is surprisingly well-done. The only games where the FMV acting was doing well was a few “Wing Commander” games and the “Myst” series.
The acting is well-done, and the sets used had a very realistic feel to them. You can honestly believe that these are real people living in a real home. Which is a good thing because many (And I mean many!) games that used FMV always seemed to fail spectacularly due to bad acting, lousy dialogue and such.
(I sometimes think that some of these people got their acting jobs because their kin to the producer or something. Thank fully that seems to be not the case here.)
(How bad were some of these FMV’s got? So bad that you were expecting a guy and two robots to offer commentary from the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. That bad!)

The detective, in the lead role, comes across as empathic and insightful, like a good school counselor. He pops up now and then to offer advice and insight into things, speaking about things in general and leaving it to us to see how they fit into the particulars.

Going through the crime screen is something else. Instead of using some game engine and rendering it all, the game uses some kind of photorealistic scanning technique I have never experienced before. It felt a lot like the “Quicktime VR” used years ago, but much more advanced. Rather then clicking on a “node” and jumping to another spot (Where your movement is limited to just spinning around 360 degrees), this particular engine allows you to you walk back and forth, left and right.

The player’s choices at the end is a nice touch, adding a bit more interaction with the situation outside of just handling evidence. You are limited to shaking your head or nodding (By just moving the mouse in the corresponding manner).

As a sample, “Episode 0” is quite effective. I have already purchased Episode 1 (and might do a review of that a well). Though the mini-games could use a bit more complexity, I still had a fun time playing them.

One minor gripe is a technical one: I use a widescreen monitor, and when the game plays, the “top three inches” of the screen is chopped off. I didn’t notice it until I saw the folders were missing the suspect tabs on top. But transferring the game to my second monitor (Which uses the traditional pan-and-scan screen) fixed that problem just fine.