Deadline Detective

Around a hundred investigations. Forty-eight hours for each one. One accusation. And, from one case file to the next, a mysterious signature that keeps reappearing.

Deadline Detective is an investigation and deduction game set in a delightfully offbeat retrofuturistic world of robots, eccentric suspects, and space liners. Build your career as an inspector, one investigation at a time, or gather your friends in a multiplayer lobby to see who can crack the case.
As your career unfolds, seemingly unrelated crimes reveal traces of someone who always appears to be one step ahead: the Archivist.
The answers are in the case files
Your desk is covered with reports, witness statements, and seized evidence. Read them, search locations, and question suspects about the leads you uncover. Not everyone is telling the truth, including the innocent.
Arrange documents on your desk, connect contradictions with red string, and confront the suspects. A successful confrontation can expose a lie and open a new lead. Get it wrong, and your credibility suffers.
The clock keeps ticking while you think
You have 48 hours for each investigation. Every question, search, and lab request moves the clock forward. The lab closes, suspects go to sleep, and some leads won’t wait for you.
You can sign your accusation as soon as you think you have the answer. But you get only one attempt to name the culprit and reconstruct the crime. Do you accuse with the evidence you have, or wait for the report that could change everything?
Your career changes how you investigate
Your results follow you from one case file to the next. Protect your credibility, rise through the ranks, and choose which investigations to pursue. Between cases, Célestin, a traveling robot salesman, offers new tools to unlock and buy.
A lie detector, a fingerprint scanner, a flying car: these tools give you new ways to search, test a lead, or save time. There’s only so much room in your drawer. Each career challenges you to assemble your own kit, but no tool will hand you the solution.
One investigation. Different conclusions.
Open a multiplayer lobby and share its code with friends or viewers of your stream. Only the host needs to own the game: everyone else can join for free from a browser, or directly from the game if they own it.
When the host starts, everyone discovers the same investigation at the same moment. Each player follows their own leads, questions suspects, and decides when to sign their accusation. The clock runs for everyone, without pausing, and accusations remain secret until the shared reveal.
Who found the culprit? Who accused too soon? At the end, the solution, everyone’s choices, and the leaderboard make the front page together. Can you beat your friends, or the streamer who opened the lobby?
Follow the thread to the Archivist
It begins with a detail out of place: a catalogue card in a criminal case file, an archive reference that shouldn’t be there. Then the same signature appears in another investigation. As you collect these traces in your Red File, you receive the Archivist’s first letters and discover the part he played in certain crimes.
This trail becomes a story in three acts that unfolds across your careers. Eventually, the Archivist addresses you directly, marks the case files left on your desk, and draws you toward special investigations. You’ll have to discover who he is, what he wants to prove, and why he chose you.

Getting fired may end your career, but it won’t erase the Red File. Your discoveries stay with you until the final confrontation, where your accusation will determine how the story ends.