Back in 2022 Think Ten Media Group brought us a little game called Case Files: The Death of Paulette Williams, a live-action video game where you assist Detective Martin Ruiz (Ramon Hamilton) in a series of interviews, attempting to understand the death of the titular Paulette Williams. Well, two years later we’re back again with another instalment in Behind Closed Doors, and this time we’re looking at the death of financial planner and possible abuser Daniel Murphy, shot to death in his own home.
Upping the ante from the previous game there’s now not just two suspects but four: the girlfriend (Camilla Susser), the girlfriend’s ex-husband (Don Novak), the next-door neighbour (Lacey Bingham), and the girlfriend’s daughter (Lauren Rice). As per the first game the player must watch a series of video interviews, compare what people are saying to what the crime scene reports and phone records are telling them, and decide who they think is telling the truth and who is a big fat liar with their pants on fire.
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Building on the layout of the first game the core gameplay loop is still much the same, involving a lot of sitting and watching people talk, but the addition of items like the phone records and crime scene reports adds a new depth to the gameplay, allowing the player to really feel like they’re tracking down the killer (or killers!), and with five possible endings to hunt up there’s a decent amount of replay value.
While the addition of the new suspect list and assorted files is a welcome addition, the gameplay itself hasn’t really moved on since the first game and most of the player’s actions devolve to picking one of two options and hoping they picked the right one (and you can usually tell if you picked right because the achievement will pop!). There is a new section where we have to find where we think the suspects might have contradicted themselves which had promise, but actually you just keep clicking until the detective tells you you’ve chosen the right one.
In some ways having all this extra information can be even more frustrating for a player and there were times when we were playing where we were convinced we had a piece of evidence that showed the suspect was lying, only for the game to instead pick some other random option that seemed barely connected. The player is given all this new information to draw their own inferences from, but has no way to apply any of the deductions or conclusions they’ve made outside of the game’s simple choice mechanic.
We did run into a nearly game-breaking technical issue on first installation when we were able to set the game resolution higher than the resolution of the monitor, which resulted in some of the options disappearing off the top and bottom of the screen, which made the game almost unplayable! We tried uninstalling, reinstalling and deleting every directory and file related to the game we could find but nothing seemed to work. Eventually it took clicking around blindly until we found the right option.
The developer has been told about this issue and has assured us that they’ll be looking into fixing this so that the options will never not be accessible, but until they issue a patch for this, it’s just something to be aware of when you’re getting set up. Beyond this initial problem the game played just fine and we didn’t encounter any other issues.
While a little more evolution in the gameplay would have been nice to see, this remains another solid little slice of FMV-goodness for fans of informative murder porn that’s available for less than ten bucks. If you liked the first game, this one is well worth your time and we’re already looking forward to a third episode in this series.
Case Files: Behind Closed Doors is available now on Steam from Think Ten Media Group.
