Porting Suda51’s the Silver Case

The story of the long-overdue PC version

The game is an interactive thriller novel.

How to summarize the games of Goichi “Suda51” Suda? We’re talking about a designer whose portfolio resembles a series of controlled explosions at a J-pop convention—from Wii brawler No More Heroes, the tale of a washed-up otaku turned swaggering hitman, to Sine Mora, a diesel punk biplane shooter in which killing enemies adds seconds to the mission clock. Suda’s creations aren’t always spectacular, but all of them are aggressively and memorably unconventional. So it’s great news that at least one of his older games is finally coming to PC—a high-def Steam remaster of the interactive mystery novel The Silver Case, Suda’s first project for the PlayStation 1 after he founded Grasshopper Manufacture in 1998. The Silver Case is being localized by Active Gaming Media, and remains an eccentric, moody fusion of cinematic influences and creatively managed limitations. Its story spans two acts, the first written by Suda himself while the second is the work of Moonlight Syndrome writer Masahi Ooka and Sako Kato. The “Transmitter” section casts you as a detective in Tokyo, hot on the heels of a serial killer, while “Placebo” is the story of a journalist covering the investigation.

The game’s interface is similarly broken-up: it introduces Grasshopper’s now-legendary Film Window storytelling engine, with separate windows for text conversations, VHS footage, animated 2D artworks and 3D environments that allow on-rails movement from marker to marker. The system was thrown together partly in the face of limited resources—the development team numbered just ten people at its largest—but also owes a debt to experimental French cinema.

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