The Case of the Worst Day Ever

The Case of the Worst Day Ever is a detective game about a family where everyone is unhappy for different reasons. You have to solve fill-in-the-blanks puzzles to find out what went wrong for each person. This game combines lighthearted, funny stories and cartoony art style with challenging puzzle-solving.

Like other deduction-based detective games, The Case of the Worst Day Ever has two modes. In the main mode, you explore a series of vignettes, clicking on people and objects to display dialogue and captions, and see the contents of containers. Some words are underlined, and clicking them adds them to a word bank at the bottom of the screen.

When you hit the “Solve” button, it takes you to the other half of the game, where you use the words from the word bank to fill in Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks puzzles. Most scenes have three puzzles: one where you identify the names of the characters, one where you identify items that belong to different people (such as whose locker is whose in a high school), and one where you complete sentences explaining the entire scene. If you need help, a series of text-based hints are available that point you to things you might have missed in the scene.

Unlike most detective games, there is no overarching plot. Each chapter follows a different member of the same family, unlocked one at a time, but they stand alone and don’t require any information from earlier scenes. The difficulty curve is gentle, starting with several simple cases with just a few characters, but ramps up to legitimately difficult cases that require rigorous logic and careful observation.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz. It is based on a pre-release game build.