Shadow at Noon

A fair-play mystery novel

Shadow at Noon is a PC interactive sound novel set around a series of cases in Amesaka. In December 2015, the eldest son of a family dies after falling down the stairs in a house on Yamate hill. The next morning, the housekeeper goes to Furumachi Precinct and confesses to pushing him. Patrol officer Makoto Kuga notices that the soup in the dead man's bowl was still warm, despite him having been dead for two or three hours. Soon after, Kuga is moved to the registry, where he spends the next eight years checking records.

The mystery follows a honkaku approach: the clues needed to solve each case appear in pages you've already read. There are no cutscenes; the story is told through text, illustrations, music, and ambient sound.