沉海录

Detective work in Liuchuan

沉海录 is a single-player, text-based detective puzzle game for PC, set in the Jiangnan region of China in 1935. You’re a bank investigator looking into an unpaid loan after a cargo boat from the Li family’s silk business sinks on its way to Shanghai. Different branches of the family dispute the boat’s assets, and the family genealogy has been burned. Your task is to reconstruct the family tree and investigate the history behind the property and inheritance dispute.

The police give you initial documents, but the investigation spreads across newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, and other records. The family’s story is scattered among sources from different years, so you have to compare accounts and work out which people, events, and names connect.