The Red Pearls of Borneo

The Red Pearls of Borneo is a detective game about solving a tragedy that took place at a colonial plantation during World War II. You must use snippets of dialogue to reconstruct which characters were where in the hours leading up to the disaster, and ultimately, what happened to them. This game expands on the timeline-building formula established by Type Help by adding items and a robust visual interface.

You play the role of a psychic investigator hired to find a missing person whose last known location was a British plantation in Borneo. Information about the case is revealed through written, non-voiced snippets of dialogue that you unlock progressively. Each snippet is relative to a specific hour and location, and it is unlocked by determining which characters were present in this specific scene based on previous information. (Sometimes a location is empty at a specific hour, in which case the game will tell you about it.)

Only a few names and a single location are available from the start though. Character names and new locations are made available after being mentioned in a piece of dialogue. When a new location is mentioned, it automatically gets added to the map and you can immediately try unlocking new snippets of dialogue relative to it. When a new character is mentioned though, you must first match their name to the right portrait in order to focus on their fate and unlock new snippets of dialogue they took part in.

You can additionally investigate objects. First, you must identify the owner of the object. Then, by focusing on an object and an hour, you can read the dialogue of the person who was interacting with the object at the time (but not anyone else who was in the room). This can give you clues to logically deduce who else was present, as well as allowing you to track people who you haven't identified yet.

To help you keep track of everything, The Red Pearls of Borneo features several different types of data visualization. When you select a particular room on the map, you can see a timeline with a box marking each hour, color-coded: green means you've unlocked the dialogue for that hour, yellow means you've partially unlocked the dialogue by using an item, gray means the room is empty, and white means you have no information about that hour yet.

By selecting a particular character, you can also see where they were at every hour where you've identified their location. Finally, there's a large bubble visualization that shows all the hours, also color-coded: green means you've located all the characters during that scene, yellow means you've located some of the characters, and red means you haven't located any of the characters. Clicking on a bubble expands it and shows you separate bubbles for every location with people in it, along with the portraits of the people who were there.

The missing person case quickly turns into a web of spies and intrigue in the final hours before the Japanese Navy closes in on Borneo. There are hidden motives, plots, and secret identities, and it's up to you to uncover it all.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.