True Crime Engine

True Crime Engine is built around one idea: giving you a case and letting you investigate it yourself.

Each case starts with a set of materials like documents, photos, recordings, messages, witness statements or anything else the author decided to include. From there, it is up to you to work out where to look next.

Cases can take you outside the game. You might need to search the web, look up a place, check a website, compare information from different sources or notice something hidden in a recording or document.

Your investigation board

Everything you find can be collected on a board.

Add images, videos, sound clips, screenshots, documents and notes, move things around, connect related evidence and keep track of whatever theory you are currently working on.

There is no required way to organize it. If something seems important, put it on the board.

Investigate with friends

Cases can be played alone or in co-op with up to 8 players.

In multiplayer, everyone works on the same investigation and can add evidence to the shared board. You can split up leads, research different things at the same time, or simply argue about what you think happened.

You can see everyone else's cursor moving around the board in real time, so it is always clear what your friends are looking at or working on. Built-in text and voice chat let you discuss evidence without leaving the game.

Examine everything

Evidence is not limited to static cards on the board.

Open PDFs directly inside the game, inspect images in detail, play audio and video files, and work with other types of case material without leaving the investigation.

Basic tools let you zoom, crop and inspect images, move through documents, replay specific parts of recordings, and take a closer look at anything that seems suspicious.

Sometimes the important part is not what a file tells you at first glance, but what is hidden inside it.

Cases from Steam Workshop

True Crime Engine is not built around a fixed set of investigations.

Cases can be downloaded through Steam Workshop, so different authors can create completely different kinds of mysteries using the same system.

They can be crime stories, missing person cases, internet mysteries, fictional investigations, ARG-like cases or something else entirely.

Make your own cases

You can also create and publish investigations yourself.

A case can contain text, images, documents, audio, questions, links and other material. You decide what the player receives at the beginning, what they have to find themselves and what they need to figure out before they can move forward.

Once it is ready, publish it to Steam Workshop for other people to investigate.