cross-posted from: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/5e966c27-5869-4e29-b322-b19b78243882
Released today on Steam, Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders is a point-and-click murder mystery set in Germany at the very end of the 19th century.
Released today on Steam, Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders is a point-and-click murder mystery set in Germany at the very end of the 19th century.
You play Detective Joseph Kreiser, working alongside public prosecutor Gustav Möbius, unraveling four different cases in an industrial city caught between progress and turmoil.
Whenever a game tries to channel that old DOS adventure energy, I get excited. Growing up on Sierra and LucasArts, there was nothing quite like the ritual of clicking every pixel, stumbling onto a clue, and piecing puzzles together with your brain instead of a waypoint marker. Casebook 1899 embraces that tradition. It doesn’t hold your hand, it doesn’t let you skip forward if you’re stumped. Some players will curse it. Others—like me—will thrive.
The presentation hits hard. VGA-inspired visuals mean chunky pixels, but there’s real detail in the environments. Every crime scene looks meticulously staged, every cutscene animated with care. This game has been in the works for four years, and it shows. It feels like one person’s love letter to an era, which is exactly what it is—Gregor Müller, a solo dev working out of Leipzig, put this whole thing together under the Homo Narrans Studio label.
Then there’s the voice acting. Full German audio with English subtitles—and that choice makes all the difference. Hearing the dialogue in the language of the setting grounds you right there on the cobblestones of Leipzig. It’s not an afterthought. It’s atmosphere.
The soundtrack, composed by Samantha Foster, leans gentle and ambient. It doesn’t dominate, but it pulls you deeper into each investigation.
Mechanically, it’s pure mouse-driven adventuring. Keyboard shortcuts exist, but if you’re hoping to slump on the couch with a gamepad, forget it. Honestly, that’s the right call. Point-and-click games are best played hunched over a desk, notebook at hand, diagrams scrawled in the margins. And yes—there’s a notebook system in the game itself, along with a deduction board that can steer you toward multiple endings depending on what you conclude.
Technically, it’s refreshingly inclusive: native Windows, Mac, and Linux builds. No Proton needed. And it’ll run on just about anything—a dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, half a gig of disk space. Steam Deck? Easy. Your grandma’s old laptop? Probably.
Launch price is C$21.14 (US$17.99, with a 10% discount running through September 11). That’s more than fair for a game born from Kickstarter funding and the grit of one developer. You’re not just buying a detective game—you’re buying a carefully reconstructed slice of 1899, pixel by pixel, voice by voice.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1841190/Casebook_1899__The_Leipzig_Murders/
This looks like just the kind of game I like. Unfortunate that it released so close to Silksong.
