Killing the Past Starts Now.

 


“You can understand without understanding.”

There are a few game devs that I look up to, people that inspire me to try and pursue making a game of my own, to put my vision out there for the world to see, Suda 51 stands as one of those game devs, a man who’s work I fell in love with as soon as I touched No More Heroes all those years ago, and a man who has me excitedly looking forward to any upcoming project he’s involved in. Recently, he put out a new game, Romeo is a Dead Man, and my interest in it has been at an all time high. However, Suda loves to acknowledge his other works in his games, maintaining a sort of “Sudaverse” with what he creates, spanning as far back as his first directorial debut, Moonlight Syndrome, which has events still referenced back in his works even now. This led me to want to start a project, a goal to experience as much Suda 51 as I can, a longterm project playing every single game I can possible that he has a big influence on its work, whether it be his most famous games such as No More Heroes, or his more out there stuff such as Fire Pro Wrestling, I want to truly see everything Suda has to offer, and my journey has begun here with The Silver Case. Now, normally I would start with Fire Pro, as that was actually his first ever project, but I’ve recently been in the mood for a visual novel, and The Silver Case specifically is the start of a long term series he works on known as Kill The Past, games linked together by an overlaying theme of, well, moving on from the past. My journey begins now, it’s time to go back to where it began, time to see what makes Suda so great in the first place, and lay the past to rest, facing the future head on. Let’s kill the past!

I suppose if I were to start anywhere with Silver Case, it would be going into its presentation and overall gameplay. Getting into its story is complicated and it’s a matter that I’d rather save for later due to how much it encompasses this game. To get the obvious out of the way, this is the most visually impressive visual novel I’ve ever played. This game oozes style in literally every single corner. The slick UI, the silver aesthetic of text boxes, the way it utilizes multiple windows to showcase different perspectives of each character, it is a visual marvel to witness, and its art style shines in every corner of the game. I was especially drawn to the way the game switched up the art style from time to time, such as black and white color scheme case 3 took on, keeping you visually interested the entire time. I’m fond of the way The Silver Case utilized live action footage at points to push its narrative, it feels crazy unique for a game made in 1999, and there are many moments where if the live action footage wasn't utilized, the impact wouldn’t be as strong. It’s easily the games highlight, and it’s a clever use of the medium, utilizing the idea of being a game to deliver an art style and direction that can only be done in a video game, making the simple action of reading be an exciting endeavor that has you excited to see what the game sends at you next, it’s incredible.

Gameplay wise, The Silver Case is rather strange, and it took me a little to adjust to its rather unintuitive control scheme. Spliced between the more focused reading segments are dedicated investigation segments where you walk around a space, making contact with various objects, and occasionally solving a puzzle here or there to progress. To actually move around these spaces, you have to navigate a compass in the bottom right corner of your screen, with each direction marked by an arrow. The M button is going to be your most used one, this pulls up a D-Pad that allows you to start moving in one of the cardinal directions, feeling rather stiff in its execution because of it. If you want to make contact with something, you have to back out of that, press the C button, and then click what you want to interact with. It’s not as cut and dry as this a lot of times though, you have to actually be facing the object you want to interact with in order to make progress, it feels rather strange, and it took me a good while to get used too, though once it clicked I started to really enjoy it, it was such a unique way to engage with a video game, and it made me fall in love with the game more than I already had at this point. The other 2 buttons are the save one, letting you save the game, and the interact button which lets you utilize different items you have to solve puzzles. It’s not utilized much though, and when the game expected me to by the end, I kinda forgot it existed. In terms of the puzzles themselves, they can feel rather basic, or sometimes annoying, though there’s so little in the game it never really became a problem. THe only notable ones I can think of is the Hit and Blow puzzle at the start, and the two investigation puzzles spaced throughout that require you to search these same looking buildings for an object to progress the plot. These parts sucked, all the buildings look the same, and it becomes incredibly repetitive with how much you have to explore. They were my least favorite parts of the game, and they came at the end of cases, feeling like a rather huge pace killer in the process. At least the final one gives you more backstory for the world though I can’t say that about the 1st investigation puzzle.

Getting into the story of The Silver Case is a rather complicated affair because in typical Suda fashion, a lot of it can be left up to interpretation and there’s aspects that are left unanswered, leaving you to piece together what exactly went down and coming to their own conclusions. I do find The Silver Case to not be as bad with it though, there is a rather basic outline of a plot to follow here, and the depth comes from the thematic elements behind it, and each character's role in the game, I had no trouble piecing the basics at first, and careful though was only needed for the rest, it strikes a good balance of opening up a mystery and giving you just the right amount of answers. In terms of what the plot is, you play as Akira, a rookie assigned to work in the Heinous Crime Unit, a police group tasked with more dangerous crimes such as high profile bombings and serial killers. The structure of the game consists of you tackling various cases, taking down different criminals in each one, and learning more about who exactly you are, and the true nature of your police force in the process. It seems rather unfocused at first, each case is rather disconnected from each other, and it takes a bit for there to be a proper link, but the final case ends up wrapping things up quite well, and I ended up enjoying the more loose structure here anyway, these cases are incredibly intriguing, and I found myself excitedly starting the next one as soon as they unlocked.

Spliced between each case are the Placebo chapters, offering a 2nd perspective on the events of the cases, having you play as Tokio Morishima, a reporter who’s been tasked to look into information on a killer known as Kamui, whose name spreads out throughout the world, being spoken of in a rather revered fashion, garnering groups of supporters. These chapters are a good breath of air between the more intense cases, and the way they utilize the 2nd perspective to introduce more backstory to the events of the game are rather clever. It does take a bit to get to this point though, the first two Placebos just felt like basic recaps of the cases, it was only with the third one and beyond that these Placebo cases started to show their true importance in the game. It didn’t help that these are easily the most repetitive parts of the game, having you do the same basic action in each one in order to progress in them. Not to say the main cases had any riveting gameplay to them, it’s just Placebo gets rather monotonous with it, and it was easily the worst part of them. It isn’t enough to hold back the rest of the game though, and it helps that Morishima is a rather intriguing protagonist, I’m especially fond of the way the game utilizes his perspective to its advantage, having him see himself as this gritty badass detective, while everyone sees him as a young kid way in over his head. By the end of Placebo too, it gets incredibly investing, especially with how it connected to the wider narrative, and Morishima ended up becoming my favorite character in the game because of it.

To get back to the cases themselves, these also don’t start strongly. The prologue case is fine, it’s a decent tutorial, but it’s too short to leave a lasting impression besides the ending, and the first case has a neat twist, but it’s pretty obvious to figure out, and it feels more like setup to the world of The Silver Case then an interesting murder mystery. It’s the 2nd case when the game begins to rapidly pick up, going full nonstop past this point, and is what truly hooked me on what The Silver Case was trying to do. It presents itself as a simple suicide, but turns into therapy  sessions with a kid basically, learning how he’s coped with the trauma of losing a friend to a heart attack. Hearing how he coped with the grief, the way he denies that his friend is dead, and the rather extreme way he learns to put it behind him, it’s heartwrenching and the way it utilized live action footage to showcase his bond with the kid, really made me feel just how depressing the death was, and it really left quite a strong impression on me. The game picks up heavily beyond this point too, just getting better and better the farther you go, till ending in what I consider a masterful twist. Major spoilers beyond this point, you’ve been warned.

I wanted to talk about cases 3 and 4 here, these cases were the ones that stuck out to me the most, and still linger in my mind as I type up this review. Case 3 has you investigate a kidnapping of a company president, trying to figure out the kidnappers motive, and where the president has been taken. It starts as a simple random case, and the kidnapper has an incredible design, but it’s the ending reveal of this case that left me hooked. In your pursuit of who the kidnapper is, you stumble upon a secret file room in the company building, detailing a scandal said company got involved in where they polluted a village’s water supply, thus turning the place into a violent hellscape that ended in the rape and death of a girl. It’s the way this information is revealed that sticks out in my mind, it involves you searching the various files for the information needed without any music accompanying it, leaving you unnerved as you learn the horrible truth, in turn making the reveal of just who exactly the kidnapper was hit all the harder. It felt like a much more personal case because of it, and it’s easily my favorite case in the game, it’s just a gripping mystery from start to finish, and the ending conversation is one that will stick in my mind for years to come, I can’t get enough of it.

Case 4 is when the game truly starts to lean more into the strange, esoteric direction, having you investigate a network of cyber crimes going on in the city. In terms of the tone and direction, it reminded me a lot of Serial Experiments Lain in how it explored how we connect to the internet, the way we can become obsessed and addicted and lose our grip on reality in the process, and a part of me even wonders if the case was inspired my Lain in some fashion, as the anime had released a year prior to the game’s release. It can be rather confusing though, it follows a lot of chatlogs mostly, and you being interrogated into the main crime group in order to track down the leader, but the most pivotal moment of the case to me was when you discover a group of obsessed idol fans hacking into her hidden cameras in order to watch her daily life. The way this information is shown is with you being part of the actual livestream and chat, watching her due to her daily tasks like any of the regular viewers are doing, leaving me incredibly uncomfortable in the process, making me feel as if I had become one of the many obsessed individuals peering into the life of someone that isn’t me. This eventually ends in her suicide too, with an incredibly haunting shot of her jumping off her building, I felt sick at myself for what I had witnessed, and it perfectly puts you in the shoes of people who become so obsessed with the wider web, forgoing everything around them to be fully part of the internet, it’s speculator in execution.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, the game is loosely connected in its narrative, the cases are basically short stories that you follow with the same cast of characters. It left me wondering just how the game would connect to a wider narrative, if it would at all even. It’s the final case that connects each one together, fully putting the pieces in play into the hellhole that you yourself stepped into. Kamui is the main linking thread here, being a name that pops up rather often throughout the game, a serial killer adored by the world for some odd reason. The major twist that connects it all is that you are Kamui, or rather a vessel intended to be Kamui. You see Kamui was a hitman who had the gift of immortality, murdering a bunch of important political figures, and sending said political groups into chaos. This murder spree, which came to be known as the Silver Case, ultimately ends with Kamui’s death, with the government realizing the full potential behind Kamui as a person. Seeing him as a sort of perfect being, the government begins to enact the shelter kids program, a program designed to mindwash a bunch of kids with special traits into becoming Kamui, perfect soldiers for the government to use however they please. You turn out to be one of these children, and it’s why you feel a rather strange connection to Kamui throughout the game. Hell, the very first case has you tracking down a Kamui vessel. This twist turns the entire case around, especially with just how much was involved in the process, and it leaves an incredibly sick feeling in your stomach the more you learn about it, it’s jawdropping. The final segment is you choosing to end this endless cycle, shutting down the machine that turns people into vessels, and ending Kamui’s reign once and for all. It made me reconsider everything that I had been doing in the game beforehand, and it completely changed how I considered the game at this point, it’s incredible, and the way it thematically ties into the idea of killing the past, choosing to let go of Kamui and instead living as your own person, is stellar, it‘s what made me really click with what Suda 51 has envisioned for his projects.

The Silver Case is a fantastic visual novel, easily my favorite out of all the ones I’ve played, and a game that will always linger in my mind now. The way it presents its sick sense of style, the more out there gameplay elements, the gripping story, it all comes together to create a phenomenal package, and I’m glad I gave it the attention it properly deserved. I highly recommend giving it a shot, it’s a great gateway into what Suda can create, and you get one of the most creative games in the medium in the process. I especially recommended checking out the short novel released after the game that ties into some elements, it’s a pretty interesting read, and it serves as a nice bonus case to read after completing the main game. I can’t wait to see what else Suda cooks up, and for now, I think it’s time for me to leave the past behind, and move forward into everything else Suda has created.