Confidential Killings is a noir investigative adventure set in 1979, where a string of murders across showbiz circles keeps linking together. The deduction loop of clicking underlined clue words and reconstructing each crime in a notebook drives the whole game.
The structure owes a clear debt to The Case of the Golden Idol, with a more serious tone than the Duck Detective comparisons suggest. Each case links to the next, from a sabotaged car crash and a poisoned drink to an electrocuted DJ and a mass poisoning.
The cases span the theater, the radio station, the Disco Venus and the Ad Astra centres, each with its own cast of suspects. A distinctive drug and the stamped CK letters tie the disparate crimes into one conspiracy.
The cases feed one overarching conspiracy, with the final dossier documents assigning every figure a role in the scheme. The pyramid-of-power dossier gives the closing stretch a satisfying sense of convergence.
The aesthetic and the sparse music both land well, and the modest presentation should run on almost any hardware. The closing epilogues narrate the fate of every surviving character, rounding the story out neatly.
The translation has rough edges, with misspellings and odd sentence structures, and the length falls far short of the advertised six to eight hours. Solving cases sometimes devolves into brute force, and character names do not carry over between cases.
Overall, the deduction loop and the layered conspiracy carry the game past its rough edges. The strong case construction and the neat character epilogues make it an easy recommendation.