Confidential Killings - A Detective Game

Introduction

Confidential Killings - A Detective Game, released 12 January 2026 by BRANE and Lorenzo Boni and published by Surefire.Games, drops the player into a string of murders across 1970s Hollywood, each one solved by hunting down clues in a static crime scene and using them to fill in the blanks of an official case report: who did what, to whom, and why. It sits Very Positive across a 284-review English sample and Mostly Positive across the full multilingual pool of 709, a wider spread between languages than most games this review covers. What's most striking reading through that sample isn't disagreement about whether the game is good, most reviewers, in both languages and in both directions on their final verdict, agree it looks and sounds great. What's striking is how consistently they agree on exactly where it falls short.

A near-universal comparison, and a near-universal compliment

Almost every review in this sample opens by placing Confidential Killings squarely in the lineage of The Case of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees Are Dead: examine a scene, extract keywords from documents and dialogue, and use them to reconstruct what happened. Reviewers overwhelmingly credit the game's presentation as a genuine strength in its own right, not just a coat of paint on a borrowed formula. The hand-drawn, comic-book-styled art and its late-1970s Hollywood noir setting, corrupt politicians, washed-up actors, drugs and blackmail, come up again and again as some of the best visual work in the genre, and multiple reviewers specifically single out the connected, slow-burn overarching story tying all nine cases together, noting that details planted early pay off in ways that only become clear many hours later. A smaller but consistent thread of praise goes to quality-of-life touches the genre's own inspiration doesn't offer, particularly a built-in note-taking feature several reviewers say they actually used.

An unusually consistent complaint: too easy, too fast

Set against that praise, this review found the dominant thread of criticism remarkably uniform, and it isn't confined to negative reviews. A large share of the reviewers who ultimately recommend the game still spend most of their review explaining why it's markedly easier than the titles it invites comparison to. Motives and solutions are frequently described as spelled out well before a player has finished gathering evidence, several reviewers say they solved cases without needing to read most of the clues in front of them, and more than one describes finishing the entire nine-case story in under three hours. That ease compounds with a second, closely related complaint about value: at a price of NZ$21.99, reviewers repeatedly question whether three to five hours of content, however polished, justifies the cost, with a common piece of advice throughout the sample being to wait for a discount or a bundle rather than buy at launch price.

A specific, widely repeated interface frustration

Beyond difficulty and length, this review found one interface complaint repeated with unusual specificity across dozens of reviews: players must re-identify already-known characters by name in every new case, even ones they solved correctly several cases earlier, and keywords can often only be extracted from one specific document even when the same word visibly appears in others. Several reviewers describe this as padding rather than a real mechanic, one joking that the detective must be forgetting names between cases, and more than one says it's the single biggest source of the game's tedium. This review reads the sheer repetition of this exact complaint, independently phrased by reviewers who otherwise disagree about how much they enjoyed the game, as a real and specific design issue rather than a one-off gripe.

Smaller bugs and a handful of technical notes

A minority of reviewers report concrete technical problems worth naming directly. One describes a case where correctly matched clues failed to register as solved even after consulting an external walkthrough, blocking completion outright, and another reports a German localisation bug that hid on-screen text during one scene, resolved by temporarily switching the game to English. Neither issue appears widely enough in this sample to call it a systemic problem, but both are specific enough, naming exact cases and exact symptoms, that this review treats them as credible individual reports rather than dismissing them.

Why this review lands where it does

It's worth being direct about how this review weighs presentation this strong against a criticism this consistent. Confidential Killings clearly succeeds at what it sets out to do visually and narratively, and its accessibility is a genuine point in its favour for players newer to the genre or put off by how punishing Golden Idol or Obra Dinn can get. But when the majority of a 284-review sample, including reviewers who ultimately recommend the game, independently converges on the same two complaints, insufficient challenge and insufficient length for the price, that's not noise, it's the clearest signal in the entire sample. This review scores it as a well-made, good-looking deduction game that undersells the deductive part of its own genre.

Final Verdict

Confidential Killings - A Detective Game is a beautifully drawn, well-told noir mystery that makes a genuinely good entry point into the deduction genre, let down by puzzles reviewers consistently find too easy and a runtime many feel doesn't match its price. Worth playing, especially for newcomers or on sale; genre veterans chasing a real challenge should look elsewhere or temper their expectations accordingly.