The Posthumous Investigation

The Posthumous Investigation is a point-and-click adventure game about solving a murder while trapped in a time loop. A dead man is trapped in Limbo until his murder is solved, and he is making you relive the day after the murder over and over until you crack the case. It’s an inventive mix of point-and-click adventure, detective game, and time travel story.

You play a private eye in 1930s Rio de Janeiro. You’ve been hired to investigate the murder of business magnate Brás Cubas, with the twist that Brás hired you himself. The murder has left him trapped in Limbo, and he can’t escape until you find the murderer. You are also trapped, reliving the day after the murder over and over. You must solve the case with only this limited allotment of time.

Most of The Posthumous Investigation involves point-and-click adventure gameplay. You walk around downtown Rio, pick up items, and talk to suspects. Your conversations reveal new clues that you can discuss with other characters, as well as unlocking new locations to travel to and new suspects to find and interrogate. By correctly interrogating the characters, you can get them to make key statements about other suspects. There are also several minigames, one of which requires some mild timing.

However, you’re limited by the time loop: at the stroke of midnight, the day’s investigation ends and you get transported to Limbo. Here Brás discusses the suspects with you and constructs a corkboard for every suspect, connecting the clues and statements about them with string and pushpins. (Note that you don’t fill in the corkboard manually — Brás does it automatically based on the information you’ve uncovered.)

When you’ve collected all the statements about a given character, you complete the corkboard and unlock a cutscene showing when that character interacted with Brás on the day of the murder. To solve the case, you must complete all the corkboards and unlock all the cutscenes, allowing you to reconstruct a timeline of Brás’s last day alive.

Upon leaving Limbo, you wake back up at 9 am on the day after the murder and everything in the world has reset. You keep your knowledge about clues and suspects but lose any items you had collected. Therefore, much of your progress is knowledge-gated. NPCs have their own schedules, moving from place to place, having conversations that you can eavesdrop on, and being willing or unwilling to talk depending on the context. Much of the gameplay relies on working out these schedules so you can be at the right place at the right time.

The game provides two hint systems in the form of a paper boy who will give you tips if you talk to him, and a lamp in Limbo that will tell you the next step if you click on it. There is also a full-featured UI that tracks what you’ve uncovered so far, including which character plotlines you need to follow up on and who you’ve spoken to about each clue.

The game is inspired by the classic Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, from author Machado de Assis. The story is complemented by hand-drawn black-and-white art with a noir flair.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.