10 Best Games For Fans Of True Crime

If you like watching real crime shows, here are the best games you can play.

If games didn’t get you interested in true crime, then a lot of podcasts or video articles on Spotify or YouTube must be to blame for your new hobby. But real cases aren’t enough anymore, and getting involved in made-up crimes in any way has become like an itch you can’t scratch.

In real life, you don’t have to be in a crime investigation team or cause chaos on the streets like in GTA 5 to get a taste of real crime. Through these famous crime games, you can be a part of a story about a murder.

Pentiment

How do you make a murder mystery more interesting when it takes place in a locked house and there is only one person to blame? In Pentiment, the murder story takes place in 16th-century Tassings, a small town in Bavaria. You play a young artist named Andreas Maler who is still in school.

Eventually, the game forces you to act as a fake detective by gathering proof, questioning people in the town, and accusing someone of the crime based on what you’ve learned. Pentiment is also known for being both a visual feast and a game with a lot of words that can be thought-provoking.

Ace Attorney

You can probably already hear the word “objection” in this picture, or you’re thinking about all of the things Phoenix has said in the game that would never be allowed in a real courtroom. But what makes this game fun and important to true crime is the thrill of being in court and showing your client’s innocence.

The Ace Attorney trilogy has been around for a while, and you may have seen jokes about it. But the most fun part of this game is reading witness statements, looking for proof, and finally getting to the truth.

Twelve Minutes

In this game, every second counts, because after twelve minutes, everything starts over. It’s fun to solve crimes, but when timers come into play, your brain has to work even harder to figure out what’s going on faster and get to the truth.

The way time works in Twelve Minutes is different, and the story is even darker than you might think.

Even if you don’t go deeper into the story, the first few hours of playing as a man who has to find ways to stop the murder of his family over and over again in a strange time loop—and failing—is already a gruesome real-life experience.

Shadows Of Doubt

Shadows of Doubt is a good mystery game with a standard but changed setting. It would be a crime not to play it. You are in an alternate 1980s, but everything is very industrialized and the government hires companies to do detective and police work.

But even though things look a little more high-tech in this alternate world, it’s still the 1980s, and gathering information will give you a good idea of what it’s like to be a private investigator. You might think you’re a pro at sneaking into your friends’ social media accounts, but that will be put to the test when you go back in time to solve problems the old-fashioned way.

LA Noire

You can relive Hollywood’s golden age by playing LA Noire. Everything about the game, from the accents to the way it looks, will remind you of a long-ago time. But you’re not here for the glitz and glory. You’re here to see the darker side of California, which is full of crime and gangs.

Even now, what makes LA Noire stand out is that you won’t just have to figure out what happened based on what people say. Instead, everything from body language to phrasing will give you clues about how to solve the crime. If you want to see the crime scenes up close and personal, you can also play the game in VR.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Danganronpa might have come to mind a few times when you thought of an RPG murder mystery. If it wasn’t the anime and the violent deaths that made you think of it, it was probably the games about a locked-down school where students are forced to kill each other and get away with it.

Trigger: Danganronpa Happy Havoc is the first game, but it’s a classic murder mystery visual novel with a lot of pink blood that stays in your thoughts. You’ll have to play detective and make sure your friends don’t get away with murder, or a bear that likes to shoot will kill you.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Even after a ship has sunk, bad things still happen on board. But what about ghost ships that have no crew left on board and sails that are worn out and drift back to where people can see them? You may have seen too many unsolved crimes and scary videos, but the Return of Obra Dinn lets you experience mystery from a safe distance.

The ship Obra Dinn was reported lost, and after five years of not getting where it was supposed to go, it washed up on the shores of Falmouth. As an insurance inspector, you’ll go on board to look at the ship’s damage and try to figure out what happened there.

Unheard – Voices of Crime

Most puzzles are pictures, but Unheard: Voices of Crime has you listen to talks from the past using a device that lets you go back to the crime scene through your ears. By listening to what people say, you can find possible suspects and piece together proof to get to the truth.

Unheard – Voices of Crime shows how shocking it is to hear what people are willing to admit or hint at when they think no one else is listening.

Cyber Manhunt

You’re not scared of murder the way it used to be done, but you are scared of data leaks and cybercrimes. Cyber Manhunt is about how cybercrime can ruin people’s lives. It’s not like a lot of big companies haven’t done things that would make a good show, like breaking your security.

It talks about things like data protection and hacking that go beyond Doodle Baseball, and every choice has an effect on everyone, for better or worse. After playing this, you’ll cover your cameras and make your account passwords even a little bit stronger.

Judgment

As fun as it is to play the mainline Yakuza games, you also get to solve a puzzle in the middle of all the fighting and singing. But if you want to focus on finding crimes in the made-up Tokyo neighborhood of Kamurocho, you’ll have to play Judgment at least once.

You play as Yagami, a former lawyer who is now a private investigator. Changing clothes, following a target, and getting into exciting street fights make it not so bad to lose the title of lawyer and find out the truth in a cool and fun way.