Amsterdam, 1988: a disgraced detective is reinstated for one night to investigate a body in the red light district, and the trail runs from morgue to pawn shop, through squat houses, opium dens and jazz bars, past brothel windows ringing the oldest church in the city, to a hotel rooftop. The setting loves its city without sanitising it, from the pink-triangle monument under construction to the tourist office’s characteristic customer service, and the whole affair is loosely based on the true story of a jazz trumpeter’s 1988 window death, revealed on the end card.
The puzzle anthology is the game’s true genre. Every clue arrives as a self-contained minigame dressed as forensics: chemical-formula assembly, shoe-print stratigraphy, weather maps, watch-face spot-the-error, liar-truth-teller logic, fingerprint overlays, ballistics comparison, counterfeit bills, bomb wires, semaphore maths, hidden-city word searches, transit-ticket routing and suitcase codes. The menu acrostic, squat-window logic grid, and beer-label cartography that overlays a map onto bottle labels stand out as the anthology’s finest entries, each with a real idea inside a familiar form.
Progress is act-gated across five acts, body through suspects, chase, last night and hotel, and wrong answers carry no penalty, a generosity that keeps the unexplained puzzles from stalling the night entirely. Crime-board structure in the second act reveals the anthology shape early, with peripheral cases solved to eliminate suspects, and the fixed linear path stays legible throughout.
The soundtrack earns singular praise. Hooked from the title screen before any gameplay begins, songs keep landing deep into the fourth act, each track strong enough to name individually, and at least one arrives as welcome relief precisely when a puzzle earns resentment. Few adventure games treat their music as a first-class citizen this consistently.
Clarity frays at the margins. A handful of puzzles never explain themselves: shoe prints brute-forced early, counterfeits solved as spot-the-difference with no visible differences, and the park path resolved by guesswork rather than deduction. The nonogram is the clearest mechanical failure, presented to anyone unfamiliar with the genre with a hint that merely names it, and the pixel-mail puzzle becomes the investigation’s low point for anyone who has not already learned the form.
The finale’s friction is structural. A “my gut tells me there’s more to find” prompt in the hotel room sends searching into every clickable surface, burning hints and patience alike, only for the game to confirm everything was already found. Look-alike names blur across logic puzzles, with Veronica, Vanessa, Victoria, Sarah and Maria occasionally swapping places mid-deduction, though each misread self-corrects. The ending holds a single fixed resolution, with no alternate branches for curiosity to chase.
Overall, the anthology’s hit rate, the lovingly researched Amsterdam setting and a soundtrack strong enough to sit on the title screen for make this a witty, humane night of deduction worth recommending. Under-explained puzzles, a phantom search prompt and a fixed ending are real costs, but the non-murder at the heart of the case lands as tragedy rather than gimmick, and the craft holds on both ends.
