/vr/ - Retro Games

Before he achieved international cult success with Killer7 and No More Heroes, Suda51 had a great run of adventure games on the PS1, but perhaps his crowning achievement is Silver Jiken. This is a moody and noirish crime story about a series of gruesome murders committed in the 24 Districts, and the special detectives dispatched to solve them. The game has two scenarios: in the Suda-written one you play as a detective following the serial killer's trail, and in the other one you play as a journalist writing a story on the murders.

Silver Jiken's presentation is top-notch, from the moody soundtrack to the excellent environments which combine a sense of end-of-century dread with a weird Uncanny Valley plasticism to its character portraits and film reel-style storytelling. The whole thing is experimental in a way that is typical of Suda and obviously the story goes wildly off the rails at one point. However it is basically impenetrable without Japanese knowledge.