Case Files Behind Closed Doors (v1.2.3)

The game focuses on the murder of Daniel Murphy, the player a detective working on the case with officer Martin Ruiz to determine which of four possible suspects are responsible. Right out of the gate the game makes it easy to suspect any one of them, primarily because the murder happened shortly after an incident of domestic abuse where Murphy hurt his girlfriend Emma Richardson. Emma is one of the suspects Ruiz will be interrogating, but you also have her ex-husband Charlie Humphries, her daughter Rebbeca, and her neighbor Janice. It’s immediately easy to believe any one of these four would want to prevent further abuse, and while Janice does sound like the odd one out initially, it doesn’t take long for her criminal history to come to light, balancing out her lower personal investment with a clearer capacity to be the kind of person capable of murder. However, these four people aren’t sneering ne’er-do-wells, and what’s more, they all have reasons to clam up under scrutiny, especially when even the innocent ones start fearing the murderer could be someone else they care for. Detective Ruiz will be the one conducting all the interviews, the player watching live recordings on their computer and weighing in at key points when Martin believes he’s hit a snag in getting more out of someone. Before the interrogation begins though, the game allows you to look over a range of hard evidence, police reports, photos of the murder, text message logs, and even security footage outside of Daniel Murphy’s house laying down concrete facts that prepare you well for starting to spot fishy statements or contradictions. Initially, the only control you will have over things though is advising Detective Ruiz, answering yes or no questions on whether to press certain subjects or if you consider the testimony authentic. Sometimes these might not be the expected kind of angles for an interrogation, Ruiz asking you if you think someone else thinks something feeling like an abstract line of attack, but this does feel like a somewhat reasonable piece of the interrogation simulation angle. You need to make judgment calls on how to proceed that do sometimes involve trying to get a read on a person’s behavior, and while the interviews are played first live, you can rewatch them, pause them, rewind, and even get two different angles on them so you can better watch the facial acting of the four suspects.