Triple Cerberus Studios has announced the launch of Edicts of the Truthsinger: The Orb of Artemagus, a hand-drawn mystery game that puts players in the shoes of a skilled investigator who must untangle a complicated web of accounts provided by biased and unreliable suspects. The game launches exclusively on Steam priced at 19.99 USD along with a companion demo that allows players to experience the first day of the investigation for free. 

With a setting inspired by the sprawling fantasy worlds of classic tabletop RPG games and gameplay designed to simulate as closely as possible the experience of coming up with questions yourself and choosing which leads feel relevant, the investigation is driven by the player’s suspicions and intuitions and not by a set, pre-ordained script for the order in which they uncover the story.

“The question generation mechanic was something we designed in direct response to watching people play mystery games where you can’t progress unless you ask the question the game has told you to ask, even if it doesn’t feel relevant to your investigation,” said Benjamin Craig, the programmer and writer behind the game’s estimated seventy-five thousand words of discoverable dialog. “We were really drawn to the idea of a game with enough depth and complexity to unfold the story in direct response to the player’s probing and enough breadth to ensure whatever way they investigated, they would find answers that could be used for the trial scene at the game’s conclusion to successfully paint a character as the guilty party.”

KEY FEATURES

• Three difficulty levels (Low Pressure, Standard, and High Stakes) for different playstyles, allowing players to choose if they want to play with time pressure or have a more relaxed, cozy mystery solving experience.
• Fully hand-drawn game art and hand-written dialog, free of any generative AI content at any phase of the game’s creation.
• Unlock new questions for the suspects with a unique system of discovering new lines of inquiry by dragging and dropping codex entries or records of things other suspects have said to you onto characters to ask them about the subject matter within.
• Six complicated, fully-realized suspect characters to interrogate, develop rapport with, and get to know, each of which has three discoverable flashback sequences with full page art to unlock.
• Gameplay that relies on genuine deduction and the active involvement of the player and their reasoning skills to piece together the facts of the case.