A Case of Distrust

A Case of Distrust is a first-person point-and-click graphic adventure game set in a noir-inspired 1920s San Francisco. Players take on the role of private detective Malone, tasked with solving a murder by investigating crime scenes, interrogating suspicious characters, and gathering evidence in this atmospheric and stylized detective mystery.

A Case of Distrust: A Review

1. Introduction: A Lady Detective in a Man’s World

In the pantheon of video game noir, most titles traffic in the archetype of the grizzled, trench-coated homme fatale—a Sam Spade or a Cole Phelps. A Case of Distrust, the 2018 debut from indie developer Ben Wander (working as The Wandering Ben), boldly subverts this tradition from its very first frame. It casts players as Phyllis Cadence Malone, a former San Francisco police officer turned private investigator, navigating the smoky, treacherous underworld of 1924 Prohibition-era California. This is not merely a change of pronouns; it is a foundational recontextualization of the hardboiled genre, injecting it with the urgent, lived realities of gender prejudice and social constraint. The game’s thesis is audacious: that the most compelling mysteries are not just about “whodunit,” but about who can—and who is allowed to—seek truth in a system designed to silence them. While its execution is masterful in establishing atmosphere and character, a fatal flaw in its core mechanical promise of detective work ultimately undermines its own narrative premise, leaving a game that feels as frustratingly inert as its sometimes-protagonist. This review will argue that A Case of Distrust is a brilliantly stylized but structurally conflicted work—a beautiful, tone-perfect vessel whose journey ends in a bewildering cul-de-sac.

2. Development History & Context: From Visceral to Vintage

• A Case of Distrust* is the first independent project of Ben Wander, a former developer at EA’s Visceral Games (known for Dead Space). His departure from the AAA sphere to forge a solo path was driven by a desire to explore a genre he felt was “underrepresented” in games: the classic hardboiled mystery. Wander’s vision was deeply researched and intentional. He immersed himself in the history of the 1920s, not just for the gangsters and gin joints, but for the burgeoning, often thwarted, women’s rights movement. This research directly shaped the protagonist; Malone’s backstory draws from pioneering figures like pilot Amelia Earhart and policewoman Alice Stebbins Wells, grounding her personal struggle in historical reality.

The game’s aesthetic was a deliberate departure from the gritty, realistic 3D of L.A. Noire (released six years prior). Instead, Wander cited the minimalist, graphic compositions of Oscar-winning designer Saul Bass—famous for his film title sequences for Hitchcock and Preminger—as the primary visual inspiration. This choice yielded the game’s signature style: stark, monochromatic silhouettes, bold shapes, and dramatic lighting rendered in 2D. Technically, it was built in Unity, a practical choice for an indie, but one that allowed for the crisp, stylized art and smooth transitions that define its presentation.

The game emerged from a fertile period for narrative indie games. It was showcased at major 2017 festivals like E3, IndieCade, and the Indie Megabooth, earning praise from outlets like Paste and Game Informer as a standout title. It was positioned as a cross between the investigative board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, the branching narrative of 80 Days, and the courtroom drama of Phoenix Wright, all filtered through the prose of Hammett and Chandler. Published by Serenity Forge LLC, a boutique publisher known for narrative-driven and revival titles, it represented a specific, curated niche: literary, thoughtful, and aesthetically bold.

3. Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Weight of the Badge

The plot is deceptively simple. Phyllis Malone, disillusioned by the sexism of the SFPD following her uncle’s death, runs a struggling PI agency. Her break comes from Connor Green, a small-time bootlegger and police informant, who receives threats from “The Black Hand.” When Green is murdered, Malone takes it upon herself to solve the case, interrogating a closed circle of suspects: Green’s jealous wife Frances, rival bootlegger Franklin Conway, mobster Raymond Carter, and others. The narrative is meticulously paced over two distinct acts: investigation and accusation.

Character & Dialogue: The writing is the game’s undeniable strength, aiming for and often achieving a “snappy,” “mature complexity.” Dialogue is dripping with period slang (“the bee’s knees,” “doll”), and Malone’s internal monologue provides a wry, world-weary counterpoint. The suspects are more than caricatures; Adventure Gamers noted the “thought and backstory” behind each. However, Malone herself is a point of critical contention. Critics like Polygon‘s Colin Campbell found her “lacking emotional force and presence,” her feminism “earnest and glib.” PC Gamer described her internal monologue as “dispassionate” and “clinical.” This speaks to a central tension: is Malone a fully realized woman grappling with her identity and era, or a vessel for thematic points? Her frequent introspections about her life choices—prompted by player-choice dialog options that have no narrative consequence—highlight this. We are given the option to shape her attitudes on drinking, marriage, and emancipation, but these choices are ephemeral flavor, never impacting the plot or other characters’ perceptions. The theme of systemic prejudice is woven throughout—not just through Malone’s experiences, but via the cab driver dialogues, which touch on racism, labor struggles, and the fallout of WWI, painting a rich, textured world far beyond the central mystery.

Thematic Core & Fatal Flaw: The game’s ultimate thematic statement is delivered in its final act, and it is here the narrative commits a profound act of self-sabotage. After building an investigation around the detective’s agency—the notebook system, gathering contradictions—Malone pieces together means, motive, and opportunity to confront a suspect. In a brutal narrative twist, the player is proven wrong. The accused calmly explains Malone’s error, and then the real killer is revealed via an exposition from another character about events Malone (and the player) had no access to. The investigation, the collected evidence, the player’s logical deductions—all are rendered “basically meaningless,” as Adventure Gamers put it. The game suddenly becomes a story about a detective’s helplessness, not a story for the detective. This negates the entire interactive promise. It tells the player, “Your role was an illusion.” While thematically consistent with Malone’s doubts and the era’s misogyny (the system withholding truth), it is a catastrophic design choice for a game predicated on player deduction. It transforms a hardboiled mystery into a passive, linear novella in its final moments.

4. Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Illusion of Inquiry

The gameplay loop is divided into two primary modes: Scene Investigation and Character Interrogation.

• Investigation: Players explore static, beautifully rendered 2D scenes (Malone’s office, a speakeasy, a barber shop) as silhouette-heavy compositions. Highlighted objects can be clicked to add their description and name to a central notebook. The art direction makes this visually engaging; finding a “bloodstain” or “threatening letter” feels significant.
• Interrogation: This is the core mechanic. Clicking a suspect brings up their silhouette portrait. Dialogue trees are navigated by selecting topics from the notebook, which is divided into Goals (current questions), Evidence (all discovered items), and Statements (topics raised by suspects). This system is reminiscent of Phoenix Wright but stripped of the urgency and consequence. The intent is to find contradictions between a suspect’s statement and physical evidence or another witness’s testimony.

Strengths: The initial loop is satisfying. The act of discovering a clue and immediately having a new question to ask feels logical and detective-like. The notebook provides a tangible sense of progress. The game’s pacing in the first half is deliberate, encouraging thorough exploration.

Weaknesses & Flaws:
1. No Real Consequences: As repeatedly noted by Adventure Gamers and Hardcore Gamer, most dialog choices—including accusations—have no bearing on the case’s progression. You can accuse anyone at any time; they will simply refuse to answer some flavor-text questions but will always provide the necessary plot information. Player choice is an illusion.
2. The “Trial and Error” Problem: Game Informer highlighted the frustration of “clocking on anything and everything” because there’s no clear feedback on what’s relevant. The system lacks a mechanism to indicate a successful contradiction or line of questioning.
3. The Final Betrayal: The greatest flaw is the ending’s complete dismissal of the player’s work. The investigation mechanics are rendered performative. The game encourages you to build a case, only to declare your case irrelevant at the climax. This isn’t just a weak ending; it’s a mechanical repudiation of the preceding 2-3 hours of gameplay.
4. Agency vs. Authorial Control: The player-choice options for Malone’s personality (to drink or not, to dwell on the past or not) exist in a vacuum. They provide immediate, unique text responses but are never referenced again. This creates a dissonance: Malone’s identity is player-dictated in micro-moments but authorially fixed in macro-consequences.

5. World-Building, Art & Sound: The Riveting Facade

Where A Case of Distrust is unimpeachable is in its atmospheric construction. This is a masterclass in stylistic cohesion.

• Visual Direction: The Saul Bass-inspired silhouette art is “immensely charming” (Paste) and “arresting” (Nintendo World Report). Using a limited, often monochromatic or dichromatic palette (shades of red for the speakeasy, blues for night exteriors), the game creates a world of stark shadows and graphic shapes that feels lifted from a 1940s poster, not a 1920s photograph. Some critics (The Verge, Nintendo World Report) noted its “slightly anachronistic” feel, borrowing more from 1950s graphic design than 1920s realism, but this is a strength, not a weakness—it heightens the timeless, mythic quality of noir.
• Sound Design: The jazz soundtrack is perfect. It’s not ambient; it’s diegetic, often coming from a radio in the room, and shifts subtly between locales. The “special musical riff” upon finding a crucial clue is a brilliant piece of audio feedback, delivering that essential “thrill of the hunt.”
• Environmental Storytelling: The world is fleshed out not through graphical detail, but through text and context. The recurring cab driver conversations are a stroke of genius. These vignettes, which range from political rants to personal anecdotes, are almost universally praised (Rock Paper Shotgun, Polygon) for “fleshing out the world” and “enveloping the player in a rich sense of time and place.” They provide historical texture, social commentary, and a sense of a living city beyond the murder case, all while Malone travels between locations. It’s a low-cost, high-impact world-building technique that more games should emulate.

The sum of these parts is an experience that feels like noir: stylish, melancholic, and rich with subtext. You can practically smell the cigar smoke and cheap perfume.

6. Reception & Legacy: A Flawed Gem

Upon release in February 2018 (Windows/macOS), later ported to Switch (Sept 2018) and iOS (Oct 2019), A Case of Distrust received generally favorable reviews, with a Metacritic score of 77/100. The critical consensus precisely mirrored the game’s internal contradictions.

• Praised: Narrative/character writing, tone, visual style, atmosphere, use of cab driver dialogues, and the strength of its central mystery up to the final act. Polygon called it “one of the best narrative adventure games I’ve ever played,” while Jump Dash Roll deemed it “essential” for noir fans.
• Criticized: The protagonist’s perceived lack of depth (or overly on-the-nose feminism), the trial-and-error nature of clue-finding, the pacing slowdown in the second half, and the devastatingly anti-climactic ending that invalidated player agency. Hardcore Gamer and Adventure Gamers were the harshest on this point, with the latter’s review title—”with no chance to solve it yourself, you may be left wondering what your role in this game actually is”—becoming a definitive critical summary.

Commercially, it remains a niche title, collected by a few thousand players on MobyGames. Its legacy is thus cultish and cautionary. It stands as a brilliant proof-of-concept for minimalist, text-driven noir in games, demonstrating that atmosphere can be built through suggestion and prose. Its influence is likely seen in later narrative adventures that prioritize tone and dialogue over complex 3D worlds. However, its most significant legacy may be as a textbook example of how not to handle player agency in a detective story. The ending’s betrayal is a lesson in narrative design: if you build your gameplay around the thrill of deduction, you cannot, in good faith, declare that deduction worthless at the conclusion. It suggests Wander had a powerful character study in mind but struggled to reconcile it with the interactive mystery format.

For a time, it hinted at a series. The ending leaves narrative threads (Malone’s uncle’s death, “The Black Hand”) dangling, and Wander’s later work includes games like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. However, no direct sequel has materialized, leaving A Case of Distrust as a potent but isolated one-shot.

7. Conclusion: The Case of the Missing Resolution

A Case of Distrust is a game of two magnificent halves and a catastrophic third. It is a stylistic triumph—a game that understands the visual and auditory language of noir better than almost any of its peers. Its world is alive with detail, its prose is sharp, and its central mystery is cleverly constructed… for the first 80% of its runtime. To experience it is to be immersed in a perfect film, only for the projector to catch fire during the climax, with the usher briskly informing you of the ending while handing you a printed synopsis.

Its place in history is complicated. It is an important indie milestone that proved a minimalist, text-heavy detective game could find an audience and critical praise. It is a vital example of genre subversion through protagonist design. Yet, it is also a cautionary tale about the sacred contract between a detective game and its player: the promise that your wits, your collected evidence, and your reasoning matter. When that contract is broken in the final moments, the entire preceding experience risks being retroactively devalued.

Verdict: Play it for the atmosphere, the writing, and the world. Endure it for the mystery. But go in prepared for a conclusion that will leave you, like Phyllis Malone, questioning not just whodunit, but why you were invited to the investigation at all. It is a flawed gem—brilliantly cut, but fatally cracked at its core.