It's August 8th 2026, and I completed The Silver Case in 18 hours.

I didn't do an update last week! oops! I was actually pretty close to completing the game at that point and so I decided I'd wait until I was done and could maybe sum up some ideas in a more complete way.

Last time I tried to word out my ideas about this game I went on a really odd tangent about, like, "how do video games respond to film as a medium?" and "How does The Silver Case implement an inspiration that feels very much embedded in movies in ways that are interesting?" and I don't know if I even have come to a sort of conclusion on that. I'll still say that it feels so informed by film language, but the way this game sort of goes back and forth unravelling on how games and movies and stories work is still kind of hard to articulate. But that's okay.

I mentioned in my little reflection rationale thing when I started doing these diary entries again that I'm really curious about like "game as process" both for a player and for someone looking at game development and I can't really think of a more fitting example to fit that role as The Silver Case. I can't think of a lot of video games that feel like they become so much more ambitious and more developed as the game progresses. Obviously my perspective is pretty limited but it feels like usually games will run out of gas as they go and not add more fuel to the tank? Every case feels so isolated in how they're designed and it's really exciting because of that.

There's an overarching story (I won't get too into it but its kind of chaotic and messy in a good way), but when I started up a new chapter of the game I was mostly looking forward to how the kind of essence of the case would be communicated through visuals and other ideas. Sometimes they're kind of game changing (when you see your first full motion video or animation segment it's like truly shocking), and other times they're more simple but always it's a real source of excitement.

I found myself really sort of getting attached to a lot of the characters. A lot of them kind of suck in a way that isn't super interesting, but that kind of fits the tone of the story being told so it never super irked me. I was kind of surprised to see this sort of very specific misogyny show up where for some reason all women hate each other and have zero empathy for other women? It's something I don't run into super often and it's a very Interesting position to take regarding, like, how you think women interface with the world. This doesn't become too much of an issue because The Silver Case is operating on like "Shonen-Manga-Level" disinterest in women as a whole, this game at it's core is about the relationships men have with eachother and (despite the ending of the game trying to trick you otherwise), women don't really seem to enter the equation almost whatsoever as like a facet of the world these characters are living in.

This game feels very much interested in ideas about emasculation in terms of how can men (individuals) effect change in the world and who is preventing them from doing that. Kill The Past, the mantra or whatever of this series, is kind of flavored (at this point in the series) as like "How can i become like, an effective man again?" and, this is totally a reduction but I can't help but kind of settle into this with how the characters who have to deal with the ideas regarding Kill The Past are in very sort of masculine/patriarchal/whatever scenarios.

I bring this up because I'm kind of curious if this will expand over the series but also because this idea is 100% Violent Cop (1989). It feels incredibly obvious that The Silver Case is taking more than a few of it's cues from Takeshi Kitano's filmography (The sound track feels very reminiscent of Joe Hisashi's work on Kitano movies), and, for my money, the movie I see the most in literal setup and Ideas is Violent Cop. There's a lot of fun rhymes (Kitano's directorial debut/Grasshopper Manufacture's first game), but down to the bones of The Silver Case there's a lot that aligns. It's definitely expanded on in a lot of interesting ways, and I'd be curious if anyone has any ideas about maybe other films informing those ideas, but the main pair of Kusabi and Sumio are ripped straight from the film's main character duo and, most striking, the core of Violent Cop is like this deep psychosexual frustration with Azuma's (Kitano) inability to effect change in the police system. I like Violent Cop a lot and I think it's underappreciated for sure. Idk I just think these two things are so in conversation.

I don't really have a big takeaway I guess. I honestly just want to start Flower, Sun, and Rain really badly so I will... If u want to talk about like the puzzles or the internet chatting in case 4 or whatever just email me or something idk...