CaseCracker

CaseCracker is a text-only investigation game built as a simulation of police work in the fictional Chinese city of Chicheng. Each case is stored as a set of key clues, and your job as a tester for the Chicheng police's recruitment system is to piece them together into a complete picture and answer the system's questions to officially crack the case.

Clues interconnect. Finding the information needed to discover another clue from an existing one is the central detective loop. Some clues require special operations to unlock: inferring a character's motives to issue a search warrant, deducing a reasonable time window to invoke surveillance footage, decoding encrypted content with the correct password. The investigation evolves as you learn which approaches work on which kinds of evidence.

The system provides hints if you're completely stuck, but using them deducts investigative points from your final score. Cases share a single worldview — each is independent but connected to the others — and hidden dark lines reward players who pay attention to patterns across multiple cases. After all cases are solved, the Chicheng police give a final evaluation based on your detection points and overall performance.