Silver Case esteve comigo por três meses, sendo a minha canção de ninar na maioria das noites. Com seus ambientes vazios e o barulhinho de máquina de escrever que o texto faz, revelou-se promissor produtor de melatonina, apesar dos raios claros do Steam Deck fritando meus olhos na madrugada.

A primeira impressão é a que importa e a que fica: duvido que jogarei tão cedo alguma VN que consiga desafiar esta em sua apresentação. Menus dinâmicos, janelas voando, trocando de forma, o fundo em fluxo constante - é o sonho estético de todo mundo que tenta representar uma ‘websfera’ dos anos 2000. Ainda que superficial, vejo este fator como extremamente importante no meu aproveitamento da obra, já que é uma execução fantástica como essa que romantiza e confere personalidade a um ato que não é muito diferente do de passar slides - só o barulhinho modular do texto conforme você apertar um botão ou outro já é uma coisa que deixa tão mais gostoso de se ler.

Não que eu queira reduzir Silver Case à uma VN tradicional: uma enorme parcela do jogo envolve um dungeon crawl - livre de estados de falha e cheia de momentos de tédio e banalidade - por masmorras do cotidiano presas em estase, como shoppings, apartamentos, escritórios e indústrias, espaços liminares desprovidos de qualquer alma viva.

Silver Case é sobre transitar nestes espaços, tatear as paredes de Tokyo-24, habitar essas zonas solitárias. Sobre processo, bater em centenas de portas, investigar cada porta e gaveta e email a troco de nada. Sobre rotina, acordar na mesma cama centenas de vezes, ir e voltar pra casa, ir ao bar de vez em quando ou bater um papo com sua tartaruga. E claro, sobre conversar com gente esquisita que fala engraçado e me faz sentir constantemente apequenado diante do turbilhão nonsense - não precisa fazer sentido.

Foi confuso e muitas vezes entediante ao ponto do sono. Estou vendido. Silver Case tem a soberba, a panache e o espírito irreverente que fica gravado na memória muito mais do que uma historinha bem amarrada. Daqui uns anos, eu posso não lembrar o nome de ninguém do jogo, mas pode saber que vou lembrar como era transitar as ruas e condomínios da cidade, e daquela vez que tive que tocar na porta de 20 apartamentos mais de uma vez na mesma missão, ou da forma deliciosamente bizonha que todo mundo conversa, da sonoplastia icônica e saborosa que cada transição de cena tem, ou da foto da lua com palavras malucas que sempre aparece no final de cada capitulo… Caralho… Que trilha sonora foda, irmão… Today’s WORD phrase is…

"BELIEVE IN THE NET"

This was a LOT to swallow honestly, but I do think I really liked this game
we'll circle back around to that after i get most of what I say out in the open
So i've already played killer7 and no more heroes 1 by this point and youd think that would already be enough under my belt to prepare me for the shit that happens in this game, but you would be wrong! and i would be wrong!

And im glad i am! because it just shows again that suda really does just go off with making shit he wants to
thats why all his shit is so Special to the point where even if there's connecting themes and such, each one of these shits has a different feel,vibe and end goal progression while still maintaining this 'Kill The Past' mantle
The music and sound design are so fucking good and the way the UI pops out like computer programs is so tantalizing to my retinas. This game boasts 2d art, 3d ps1 cgi and FMVs of whole ass real people and locations to convey this unique flavor I dont think ive seen done before. On top of this I also really like the dialogue it can be so immensely funny, sometimes it feels on accident with how humorous some things can be in this game because i was overall having that more than a serious gritty story i was sinking my teeth into.. lots of mysteries yeah! but.. ill get to that..

It's just im tapering myself off because for as much as im singing praises right now

I REALLY REALLY wish I could dicksuck this game, I REALLY REALLY DO but.. there's some problems i have

For starters, Im already not too fond of visual novels as a medium for my games
I like when there's interactivity involved.. maybe a puzzle here or there or using the bulk of the dialogue to it's advantage
I feel ALMOST none of that here with this game, it mostly just felt like I was reading an interactive web graphic novel which is so cool but also..
It was on occassion more than once where I was like "do i Really wanna keep playing this game though... do i Really like this that much" and then something interesting happens in the story or a revelation or something that makes me think about it a bit more and what could happen and im snapped out of it.

Though more often than not there's so many moments in this game where I feel like i wouldve benefited from keeping a log
or some kind of journal to quick look and brush up on things thatve happened previously, its a remaster of a PS1 visual novel so its not really like i expected the world of it with quality of life things thatre commonplace now

it's just also I put off writing this review because ive been scrambling to fill in the gaps of my knowledge and bits where i was confused getting cleared up lolol. Which is STRANGE because I feel like I was more palpably confused about THIS than killer7, which by all intents and purposes doesnt make any fucking sense because this has 10 times the dialogue killer7 even has. I think its the fact that my theorizing and such amounted to next to nothing with this game and that knocked the wind out of my sails about it, silly as it sounds. Like I won't really go into spoilers here but there's numerous occassions where i've put two and two together because im insane Or because of my prior expectations from killer7

and then all of a sudden the game just kind of walks stark ass naked in my face with my theory proven right like halfway through the game or even earlier than that
So then im sitting there like.. the fuck? then where is this gonna go? And then in the final couple cases it felt like i was getting the plot dumping of the century like the game had taco tuesday and laxatives ala mode stuffed up it's brain and i was seeing it all bounce forth

This was a double edged sword feeling to me because while I do think the narrative of this game is really good i think its absolutely fair to say that retaining certain things that may or may not be relevant later on to the story is something that not everyone is gonna be able to do, shit i was barely able to but maybe thats because this game didnt hit a very specific stimulant in my brain
And thats not necessarily it's fault in particular
What is its fault is that I think that this doesnt really feel like an adventure game or a puzzle game like the genres slapped onto it imply and its just feels like a cool, stylized visual novel

The puzzles I just could not care about whatsoever and I think its actually kind of funny in retrospect that just tapping a button solves them if you really just only care about the story, which ADMITTEDLY i started to only care about the story!

This is all why I said i think I like The Silver Case rather than I think i LOVE the silver case or that i LOVE the silver case, I think characters like Tokio, Sumio, Kusabi, Morikawa and Hachisuka are interesting characters but I think i walked away from this game with specifically Tokio and Kusabi as favorites overall. i think there's something that just wasnt.. igniting in me like i wanted to happen with this game and my expectations were loud while this is very much an inside voice game so to speak, in the fact of the matter that it's gameplay is subtle.. its nuance with its writing.. is subtle
It's very open and upfront about the thinkpieces on crime, cops, and how changing shit from the inside doesnt work out and how often times government will manufacture something to keep higher power regardless of the intent..

but, yeah. btw I was so confused at some points infact that Im embarrassed to admit I didnt connect two and two that Tokio in Transmitter and Tokio in Placebo were the same guy. like. probably my dumbest moment ever when i realized that by Parade LMFAO

final thoughts: if youre keen on visual novels as one of your favorite mediums of games then you have absolutely no reason to skip out on this but if youre lukewarm or neutral on the genre this may not hit the same as some of suda's other stuff. i fully understand why this was one of his breakout magnum opus, but go into this expecting a nearly completely narratively driven experience and Please
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!!! REMEMBER YOU CAN SCROLL UP AND DOWN WITH YOUR MOUSE, THERE WAS SO MANY TIMES WHEN I WAS WALKING UP AND AROUND AND I FORGOT YOU COULD DO THAT IN THE GAME AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

i jinxed myself hard before playing this.

i never been a fan of visual novels, the ones i ever played where suspicious at best, being interested in the sudaverse i decided to start from the very beggining (not moonlight, can't read japanese !). this is possible one of the worst introductions to visual novels. i am no impatient person i enjoy reading, i have a book case which i keep some pretty big classics, not big in scope or notoriety but lenght, i'm talking 700 pages or something, thats not to fill ego, its just to explain background.
when recomending silver case, the fans don't seem to take into account that this isn't exactly meant to be taken as a 1 to 1 visual novel, its episodic in a way, its mean't to be played like a tv series, one episode a day or two if you have the mindset to it. going in guns blazing expecting a full on novel through and through ruined the experience for me, i almost dropped it.
take one thing into account, this game is long, one could finish in 16 hours of lenght, i ended up finishing in 38, in trying to finish it fast because i wasn't having a good time with the controls or the slow paced story, so i would leave the game open and try to take breaks , sometimes in the middle of the chapter simply because i was fed up, then i decided to take a different approach, get to it like a episodic series, watch one or two a day, read it carefully, get a snack or a drink and enjoy the 40 minute or something chapter, that's when it finally clicked for me, i started to appreciate it more, the game is separated into two chunks, transmitter and placebo, transmitter is the main event while placebo is some sort of spin off to one of the characters, sort of like the riku parts of kingdom hearts where you control him in case youre familiar with kingdom hearts.
at first i couldn't take placeboo, it felt like filling sausage, again simply because of my bad approach to the game, but as i took my time i appreciated placebo, it has sort of a comfy vibe to it, tokio, the main character of the placebo episodes ended up becoming my second favorite, this guy is just fun to watch through even if placebo is much less focused on being crazy like the main campaign, i ended up looking more foward to seeing the reactions through the perspective of tokio regarding the events of the main campaign, having done this, the game was over before i even knew it, and oh boy what a ride.
come into this game knowing what youre getting into, this is not a direct visual novel, it helps if youre familiar with twin peaks style.

will i ever replay this ? probably no, but i'm glad i finished it, its definelly one of these stories that don't give you everything, it gives you enough and lets you wander, i can't wait to try flower sun and rainbow

I am so conflicted. Aesthetically, this game is absolutely genius. There is no arguing that. The writing in several places was fantastic and so refreshingly human, but honestly in others, it felt... hard to grasp? From kamuidrone on, the story made perfect sense to me in what it was trying to do, but artistically, I really can't think what Suda was going for in the early chapters. The same also applies moreso to the placebo campaign. The gameplay segments are almost entirely tedious, the text scroll sound is grating and style over substance seems to be the winning philosophy... but the game also stunned me at moments, had me pause to admire the visual diversity and craftsmanship and possibly broke my writers block.

one day I will write a proper essay and/or make a feature-length youtube video on my favourite video game but for now here's some notes:

- I have never played a game that so effortlessly deconstructs it's own medium while marrying gameplay and story and themes until this game

- Neoliberalism + the police state + the information/digital age on blast

- all of tokio's segments hit harder in post-covid 2023

- kaumi is the demon of the info age, the human manifestation of the violence of the state

- a story about power and where it lays

- if we take neoliberalism to be the capitalism of "choice" in that it exploits freedom, then mechanically and thematically, the silver case is a direct confrontation of the dichotomy between freedom and power. we can take video games to be the arch artform of the neoliberal era, a form that gives the audience the chance, the freedom to make choices, the freedom to create their own narratives in the worlds laid before them. Visual novels/Japanese adventure games generally offer the player different kinds of narrative choices to affect the world laid before, the silver case actively pushes against this. in both scenarios, "transmitter" and "placebo", we play as two characters not in control of their own narratives, powerless to affect any change. the most amount of choice we have mechanically is to walk around a 3d environment and follow, for the most part, very rigid instructions. as we learn towards the end of the game, these characters' narratives have been affected before the we even pressed start. when we play a videogame, the choice given to us is obviously an illusion, boundaries always programmed in, our freedom is always limited despite many times being actively sold to us by PR as enticing freedoms. a competiton of freedoms.

- when we explore the 3d environments, no persons exist within them, simply objective markers. within the environments produced by the state + the financial markets + land developers we are alienated to the other occupants, only the images of a person is presented to us.

- the music bangs

- the loud typing sounds make us constantly aware of 1. the primary mode of communication in the digital age 2. the often overwhelming, sometimes annoying abundance of information in our age 3. that someone (suda5, masahi ooka and sako kato) has wrote this all out for us to engage with, likely on a keyboard

- much of the tediousness is wholly intentional, integrated with game's themes of information abundance and the bureaucracy of the state as a form of power. but it also has the effect of lulling the player into it's world, repetition can be a powerful sedative to those willing to give in. it's Tarkovsky-esque lol

- just like sick UI/UX design how can you not love it pal
(more maybe later, need to play the 25th ward now)

Not that I've played a lot of video games that have detective stories that have 0% of gameplay that consist of assaulting evil dudes who are not trying to hug you, but this game genuinely feels like a REAL mystery of unraveling crime even without any sort of literal way to interact with the narrative.

What this means is that you are absolutely supposed to pay attention while being forced to feel alienated/confused the whole time, something the game does incredibly well to an extreme benefit and disadvantage to itself. There are times where you are just reading and times where you are just solving some puzzle for some reason (even with the game poking fun sort of at the adventure game aspect of that). The mere fact I finished this game initially and had so many questions/misunderstandings but I can go back and slowly shift the pieces in my mind to where I feel like I have a mental cork-board with 30 photographs and string is enough to make this game enjoyable to me, but obviously that's less gameplay design and more narrative design if anything.

One problem I have with VNs is that they always feel me too much like novels, while the visual ascpect always somewhat lacking in my eyes. The silver case fixes that problem with me with cutting a lot of fluf VN dialogue as well as having the coolest visual style imagineable.

But what's a novel without a good story and the silver case brings that in spades with 2 different campaigns that focuses on 2 different views, the authorities within the 24th wards and the civilains within it. Possible one of the best denpa works I've consumed right next something like SEL or the documentary "The New God".

"if you kill him, you can release yourself from this curse.
will you live by killing your past...?
or will you die clinging to your past...?
can you keep moving forward?
can you live after facing your true self?
decide, here and now, Big Dick!
pull the trigger on the devil's gun!"

Eu acho que nunca tive uma experiência tão boa narrativamente, The Silver Case é uma obra-prima e mesmo que sua jogabilidade não seja lá das melhores, ele acerta em todos os outros aspectos. Sumio e Kusabi são dois dos meus personagens favoritos da mídia em geral depois de jogar isso, todos os outros também são incríveis como Morishima, Chizuru, Morikawa, etc. A trilha sonora é impecável e obviamente, a história. Meu Deus, essa história é incrível, tudo começando como uma investigação criminal comum e acabando em uma viagem dentro de um conceito do que é ser um assassino, metáforas e intrigas. Simplesmente um dos melhores jogos que eu já joguei na minha vida, estou muito animado para jogar Flower, Sun and Rain e 25th Ward alguma hora, mas por enquanto, preciso descansar e digerir o tanto de informação que esse jogo me deu.

"destroy the darkness.
seize the light.
kill the shadow.
and give birth to the light.
kill the past."

Playing FSR before this was an interesting choice, I'd even say it enhanced my experience as the Lospass investigation in 2001 cast a dark insight over my understanding of the events of 1999. I found myself recognizing names, faces, events, places, not enough to give me any crucial information on the Kamui case, but instead adding an incredible weight to the characters and events that take place here.
I came into the story knowing some of these characters, or at least thinking I did, and my expectations were fully blown out of the water. Things were left unaddressed that I completely expected to be explained, and other things were explained that added so much depth to things I thought I understood. Now I have one more puzzle piece, time to collect the rest!

Too much to say about this one, really, which usually means that it will end up becoming one of my favorite things ever a couple of years from now.

All the style it has - and if there is something that nobody can deny is that this game has style - serves its themes perfectly.

Like a slow cinema police procedural, the amount of thematical twists this manages to pull off is astonishing, particularly when you consider the "gameplay" and how it lulls you a certain flow, giving you agency as quickly as it takes it away from you. You can row, but there's only a single path that river can take.

Masahi Ooka is a genius from writing something so well structured as Placebo.

Now to dust off the trusty DSi with my R4 card to finally understand what the fuck was going on 13 years ago when I triedplaying Flower, Sun and Rain and turned if off after 1 hour.