Every so often I come back to a daydream about an investigation game (think Her Story, Immortality, Gone Home, Digital: A Love Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, etc.) but with a premise like you’re in a small town and have access to a bunch of messy data from all over the place, mostly in Excel files but also receipts, security cam footage, maps, stuff like that.
Maybe you’re a a hacker or an AI that was able to gain illicit access to everything, but now you have to clean up and correlate everything without outside help (i.e. no ability to ask things like “Who is employee 731?”- either you figure it out or you don’t).
Another Night at the Archive has some of those elements; I haven’t beaten it myself but you definitely have to e.g. match security camera transcripts to timelines.
Every so often I come back to a daydream about an investigation game (think Her Story, Immortality, Gone Home, Digital: A Love Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, etc.) but with a premise like you’re in a small town and have access to a bunch of messy data from all over the place, mostly in Excel files but also receipts, security cam footage, maps, stuff like that.
Maybe you’re a a hacker or an AI that was able to gain illicit access to everything, but now you have to clean up and correlate everything without outside help (i.e. no ability to ask things like “Who is employee 731?”- either you figure it out or you don’t).
DnD.Sci comes pretty close, but I wonder if making it more messy and involving things besides just CSV tables and borrowing ideas from things like https://www.huntakiller.com/products/nancy-drew-mystery-at-magnolia-gardens lets one fit in a lot more rationality skills besides just data analysis.
Another Night at the Archive has some of those elements; I haven’t beaten it myself but you definitely have to e.g. match security camera transcripts to timelines.
Ooh nice! You reminded me of A Hand With Many Fingers, as well.