The Centennial Case : A Shijima Story

Review

The game begins with the book signing of the mystery writer Haruka Kagami and her new book in the Detective Makoto Nishimari series. Standing in line to get their book signed is Eiji Shijima, a friend who’s helped Haruka Kagami.  However, Eiji isn’t really there for the book signing but wants a favour from Haruka. The Shijima family have a once-in-a-century succession at their family home at the foot of Mount Fuji and wants Huruka and her assistant Akari to get some information for him.

Eiji wants to learn more about his family and the research they have done for many years about stopping the aging process. So, he wants Haruka to investigate under the pretence that she is writing a feature story on their family and the Fruit of Youth. The Fruit of Youth has been passed down for generations in the Shijima family, which is said to give a person who eats the fruit eternal youth. There is also another mystery which has just revealed itself; a skeleton has been found beneath the ceremonial cherry tree and Eiji wants you to investigate it.

This is shown to you in a Full Motion Video (FMV), and is the first part of the crime, the Incident Phase, where you’ll gain information and clues to the current story. There are multiple chapters ranging over the last century of the Shijima family and you’ll have a varying number of FVM’s in each of the chapters detailing the stories.

Once you have watched the FMV and collected the clues in one of the chapters you’ll move onto the Cognitive Reasoning Space. This is divided into three areas, with various video clips from the FMV you have just watched along the top of the screen. On the left is the Path of Logic, which is a path of hexagonal tiles four wide and populated at varying places with red mysteries tiles. To the right of the Path of Logic are your clues which are floating in front of corresponding FMV clips.

Each red tile has a small amount of information on it, as do the clues, and both have some sort of pattern on them. You can then take one of the floating clues and match it with the mysteries tiles to create a hypothesis. Creating multiple hypotheses will allow you to unlock the truth; you will just have to decide what the truth is from what you have uncovered. Once you have found enough hypotheses you can move onto the next section, which is your Solution.

Your Solution will play out as an FMV but stops at specific points allowing you to make a deduction about how the crime was committed and who was responsible. You’ll have to be sure about your deduction, as the accused may refute your claims so you’ll need to provide evidence if you’re going to solve the case. You will be able to use any of the hypotheses to find additional evidence and prove your case.

Upon solving the case you’ll be scored on how well you did; you’ll gain points for your reasoning and identifying certain evidence and proof. However, you’ll lose points for getting a deduction wrong or accusing the wrong suspect, which will have an overall effect on your Rank score.

In the options you’ll find settings for Text (Display Subtitles, Accessibility, Subtitle Background On/Off, Background Transparency Slider), Sound (Background Music, Sound Effects and Voice Volume Sliders), Screen (Brightness, Window Mode, Resolution and Game Art), Graphics (Vertical Sync, Frame Rate, 3D Resolution and 3D Effects), Language (English, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese Traditional and Simplified, Audio Language English and Japanese).

I’ve enjoyed playing The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story so far and I haven’t had any problems running the game. I liked the stories and the outcomes are not too easy to figure out.  You can have multiple bites of the cherry until you get the correct deduction but that affects your ranking upon completing a chapter. So, if you want that perfect score, pay more attention than I did, especially when giving your reasoning around who committed the crime and how it was was performed; I was useless (which makes a change).

I know some folks aren’t happy that the video resolution is 1080p instead of 4K like on consoles, but the videos weren’t that bad in my opinion. However, the developers have said that they will rectify this in the future and have the videos running at 4K, although this will increase the size of the game by quite a bit.

The only real nit-pick I had was that when using keyboard and mouse to navigate around the game and settings I was unable to see a cursor anywhere on my screen, which made it impossible to select anything with my mouse.  Using the keyboard’s arrow keys was fine, it worked perfectly to navigate, however using a gamepad was the way to go for me.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

The Centennial Case : A Shijima Story Steam Store Page