It boggles my mind that this has a "mostly positive" rating as of May 24th. This is the kind of mystery game that we get once in a never. If you're a fan of Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, 428, 999/VLR, etc. you can safely stop here and add to cart- even for the steep-ish price. ~16 hours of mystery goodness with some wild twists. IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't miss out on the epilogue that appears at the very bottom of the menu after the credits roll. It's the true end of the game.

Centennial Case feels very much like an interactive season of a murder mystery tv show. There's got to be 10 hours of live-action footage here at least, not counting wrong answers/bad ends. The acting is pretty good if a bit hammy in places, but the writing and atmosphere will fully pull you in. The soundtrack, by Yuki Hayashi- known for My Hero Academia among other things- is fantastic and really amps up dramatic moments in the story. I'll be listening to it on its won.

The structure is similar to AA/Danganronpa. There are 4-5 cases (depending on how you count them) with a big underlying mystery running through all of them and a big-ass explosion of reveals at the end. The individual cases are well-written and generally surprising in one aspect or another. I, an experienced armchair detective (as pretentious as that sounds), rarely had a full mystery figured out even if I saw through some tricks.

What's also interesting is how the game equips and engages the player with the clues. After watching "the show" for each case, the player is taken to a deduction board of sorts. There's a pattern matching game that takes place here where the player matches clues tiles up to mysteries tiles by the way the borders of the mystery match the borders of the clue. This is the weakest aspect of the game, BUT it's really just a device to force the player to consider the clues. Each match that is made will generate a hypothesis about some aspect of the case. The player should then be think about which hypotheses fit well with other hypotheses and point the way to the true solution.

Once this deduction section is complete, we go to the traditional "gathering of the suspects" where the detective explains the solution. But at critical points in the explanation, the game asks the player to answer important questions about how the crime was committed and who did it. It works really well, as the deduction board section does a really good job of preparing the player without necessarily making them feel like they've fully solved the case. The questions asked are usually narrow enough to guide the player gently towards the solution while still allowing them to fail.

What's also cool is how well the game tracks all the information you acquire. At any time, maps relevants to the case, names and relations of character, clues and hypotheses created, and more are available in a slick interface. There's even a timeline that gets updated over the course of the game with a couple of cool surprises.

As mentioned above, everything culminates in a series of reveals that I didn't see coming. I won't say more than that.

But ultimately, this is an easy contender for my game of the year. It's amazing that it got made, it's amazing that it was localized, and I fear that, given the minimal marketing, we will never see its like again. Highly recommended.