+Super cool aesthetic, this game could be about literally nothing and it would still be one of the most visually memorable experiences in gaming.

+Really interesting period piece about the internet age during it's dawn that still rings true to this day on how we perceive crime and the police in modern times, up there with Serial Experiments Lain with stories about the dawn of the digital era that predicted the future.

= Though I liked a few characters in the cast, remembering their names when all I had was half a second to see a pixelized, opaque lettering of their names made the story a lot harder to follow than it had any right to be for the sake of doing something different, this game is the biggest argument for all text heavy games needing a backlog.

-You could not pay me to give a fuck about this gameplay, I honestly feel like this should have been a visual novel instead because every instance of interactivity feels like an absolute nuisance, something as basic as turning around, walking somewhere or having a scene transition could take as long as 15 seconds. The puzzles having an insta-solving button should tell you how much of an afterthought they are.

-The final chapter in particular is filled with padding thinly disguised as suspense and whoever thought it was a good idea to walk through 10 towers individually to search for a sentence's worth of text can eat the pinkest part of my asshole. And that's not counting the placebo chapters which are just some guy reading emails about the case you just played and spoon-feeding you exposition emails in case you were sucking on your thumb instead of reading the chapter you were playing, all of that culminates in a game with a cool as fuck beginning and ending, but with a very dragged out middle.

While my complains are more wordy than the positives I feel like other reviews have said enough about the positives of the game so it's only fair I highlight the more problematic sides of The Silver Case. I've heard Flower Sun and Rain and The 25th ward get better on that regard so I'm looking forward to finally recognizing Suda51 as the auteur he is.

"Sure. We're philanthropists. We're doin' society a favor. So what if we make a li'l money at the same time? We need drugs and organs. We ain't capable of adaptin' to space. The darkness, the loneliness.... It don't matter how well trained you are. You always give in. You know what I'm talkin' about, don't you, Jonny boy?"

It's easy to explain Kojima's quirks as a video game director by calling him a westaboo, wannabe movie producer, but by analyzing the likes of Snatcher, and especially Policenauts, we can see that by dabbing for a bit on the arts of VN/Adventure games, Kojima wanted to transcend the usual expository heavy dialogue nature of Visual Novels by combining it with his knowledge of movie directing, thus making these two odd entries in his catalogue feel like the missing link between Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and what we would come to know as the iconic game that would change the landscape of gaming ever since, Metal Gear Solid 1

It really is a shame that this game was a Japan exclusive without ever being localized (not counting the fan-translation) due to the poor sales of Snatcher, because it feels right up there with Kojima's best works. Something which it's influences seep right into the rest of the series, given the addition of Meryl, Foxhound, the leitmotifs of the main theme being in MGS1, and the particularly sexy voice of Jonathan Ingram being cast by what would be Otacon's seiyuu, Tanaka Hideyuki.

Part of me wishes I could play the original PC-98 version since I love the aesthetic of the eroge pixel art they have with ports of those games, but the FMV animations they did for consoles are not a bad stylistic choice either, it all adds to the feeling of watching a direct do VHS OVA that only helps with the atmosphere.

Speaking of atmosphere, the worldbuilding is nothing short of fantastic, Kojima's word salad is at it's most cohesive here, everything from the scientifically accurate explanations of the adverse effects of space travel on the human body down to the osteoporosis caused by the lack of gravity and built up stress that results in less production of calcium, not only you can tell that Kojima did his homework about the space rush, but developed a believable world with airtight internal logic that best depicts this cool, otherworldly futuristic view of the cyberpunk world that makes you want to live in it as much as you wish to stay away from it.

While this is not the last time Kojima would speak about the space rush and revolve his games around the consequences of the cold war, it is the first time he specifically tries to imagine a world where we bothered to invest in space travel, proving that we cannot beat the final frontier for a reason, be it Jonathan's lost decades as he is forced to live in the past due to time flowing without him processing what he lost, to the shortage of organs and pharmaceutical conspiracies caused by the complications of living in space, the final frontier becomes less of a limit to be broken, and more of a cosmic horror that defines how it's denizens should act, that perhaps humanity itself evolved in the wrong path for trying to think it could ever escape the planet and it's laws that formed hundreds of thousands of history engraved in it's genetic code.

Can we ever get accustomed to living in an ambient that we were never meant to be at? Are humanity's achievements something to really be proud of, or is it all merely a luck of the genetic draw? Have we evolved too fast, or not evolved at all, if we are still faced with the same problems no matter what time we are at?

While the vibes and music alone would have made Policenauts an immaculate experience by itself, the Solid™ character and narrative writing from Kojima when he was at his prime makes it go the extra mile into a story that feels fresh 30 years after it's inception that I whole heartedly recommend it, for it has all the blueprints of what all would come to love from his most iconic intellectual property.

Also I'm surprised to see so many people complaining about the groping and the sexism on this one. As far as visual novels for the PC-98 go this is quite tame.

Sintomas comuns de síndrome de Estocolmo:

• Memória seletiva de atos positivos ou gentis do abusador ou agressor.
• Negação, minimização ou desculpas apresentadas para abuso ou maus-tratos.
• Achar Mega Man X6 bom, ou em casos graves, melhor que X5.