Review for The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. Game for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Linux, the video game was released on 13/03/2018
It is terribly difficult to objectively talk about The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. This visual novel hybrid by Suda51 is the direct sequel to The Silver Case and, like the games of the genre Kill the Past, is related to other Grasshopper Manufacture (and Human Entertainment) games such as Flower, Sun and Rain e killer7.
The reason we started talking about The 25th Ward: The Silver Case this way is, essentially, because it requires player participation that extends beyond character control - the game strives for the player to give their own personal interpretation of the characters. facts told, an interpretation that therefore becomes truth for him. And this conflict between "truth" and "facts", one of the topics covered in the game, it will lead the player to be no longer an external observer, but at the same level as the various characters by The 25th Ward: The Silver Case.
Three different points of view
In The 25th Ward: The Silver Case the story is told, as in the previous game, following the point of view of different characters, divided into three chapters: Correctness, Matchmaker e Placebo.
In Correctness we follow Mokutaro Shiroyabu and Shinko Kuroyanagi, two detectives of the Heinous Crimes Unit section of the new XNUMXth district grappling with a series of cases that once again revolve around the almost mystical presence of Kamui Uehara, the legendary serial killer of the Twenty-four districts now followed and almost venerated by many people as "the one who has the power to break down the wall of worldliness and change the system". Although Kamui is not directly involved in this case, he remains the motionless engine of events.
In Matchmaker, on the other hand, we meet two characters on the opposite side of society compared to Shiroyabu and Kuroyanagi, namely Shinkai Tsuki and Yotaro Osato. Tsuki and Osato are part of the Regional Adjustment Bureau, the government agency responsible for the regular "cleaning" of the inhabitants of the XNUMXth district.
The Twenty-fifth district, in fact, was born for one purpose only: to be a utopia, a place similar to the other Twenty-four districts, without however the errors of the latter. But Kamui's influence and the general human disposition still gives life to the criminal power which, when implemented, brings doubt and insecurity into people's hearts.
And so it is, between deliverymen, divers and observers, code names for those who are essentially professional killers, that there is a dark side of government aimed at "cleaning up" the dubious elements of the otherwise utopian XNUMXth district.
Finally, in Placebo we will return to follow the story of Tokio Morishima, the freelance journalist who has taken on an important role in the story since the previous game. His story is strongly linked to past events in Flower, Sun and Rain, and in The 25th Ward: The Silver Case we will see him searching for his lost memories along with his Red turtle and Slash, another character named in the first game.
Psychology of crime
Getting to the heart of the matter, it must be said that The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is by no means a game to be underestimated. Picking up the story from where it left off in The Silver Case, Suda51 somehow managed to deliver the exposure at the same time more direct and more cryptic than before: As events unfold the characters will offer explanations, helping us to follow the flow of the story, but the concepts and themes present go deeper than in the previous game.
Although there are occasionally lighter and more entertaining situations, between slightly comic relief characters and cheerful conversations, the beating heart of the story remains the one that made us fall in love with this world: a psychological thriller with some supernatural aspects, characters surrounded by the mystery that we will come to know better as we continue in the story, a "reality" different from ours that we will have to learn to interpret.
What we discovered, however, is that the world told in the game and our world are very similar, but at the same time completely different. When we played it, we realized that to really experience the story we had to tell abandon our prior knowledge, that is, in a certain sense, abandoning our logic and throwing ourselves headlong into the XNUMXth district.
What we mean is much easier to understand than to explain: due to the uniqueness of the world of The 25th Ward: The Silver Case, populated by secret societies of murderers, ESPers and people who apparently do not need a physical body as they live in a "higher plane of existence", our knowledge comes into conflict with that of the characters as our definitions of "normality" are very different.
This is how we followed Samuel Taylor Coleridge's advice and our disbelief suspended. By being able to put our common sense aside, we have therefore become free to assimilate all the information that the game provides us and able to give our interpretation of the events that have taken place, in short, to arrive at an answer to our questions. This answer then becomes our unique and personal truth.
This is how we felt an integral part of the gamerather than outsiders relegated to the task of moving a character on the screen.
The hidden faces of the nut
Speaking of gameplay, there have been some changes from the previous game. The 25th Ward: The Silver Case remains a visual novel mixed with an adventure game, as it is possible to move through the various scenarios to solve the puzzles; instead of the previous game's control system, however, the player will have to three-dimensionally rotate a nut with the various possible actions above, which remain for the most part the same as in The Silver Case.
What really changes are movement and exploration: the player will no longer be able to move freely on the map, stopping at fixed points, but will simply have to choose a direction and the character will move automatically. This, combined with the presence of longer puzzles, could be the only discordant note we detected: these exploratory parts do provide a break from the text parts, but they can also be monotonous.
The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a game that really thrilled us. We were captivated by the world told by Goichi Suda and his team and we can only ask ourselves if this has really come to an end… even if, knowing the perpetuity of Kamui Uehara's presence, we can sketch an answer within us.
► The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is an Adventure-Visual Novel game developed and published by Grasshopper Manufacture for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Linux, the video game was released on 13/03/2018
