The Posthumous Investigation turns a murder mystery into a deadly time loop
Your client is dead and the day keeps resetting
- Solve a murder across repeating days
- Investigate fourteen suspects and their secrets
- Rearrange routines to uncover new clues
Groundhog Day, but the groundhog's been murdered. That's more or less where The Posthumous Investigation starts, and I'd say it's a better use of a time loop than most things that borrow one.
You're a private investigator, and your client is a dead man. An influential entrepreneur, killed, who has somehow got round to hiring you anyway. You've got one day to find out who did it, and when that day runs out, it simply starts over with everything you learned still rattling around in your head. Bill Murray had the same arrangement, and he mostly used it to learn piano.
The whole thing takes place in a hand-drawn, noir take on 1937 Rio de Janeiro, and The Posthumous Investigation is built as a reimagining of the work of Machado de Assis. And he did famously write a novel narrated by a dead man back in 1881, so the gag is over a century old at this point.
Fourteen suspects potter about the city on their own daily routines, all with their own secrets and their own reasons for wanting your client in the ground. So, you watch them, tail them, question them, and slowly find the seams in what they're telling you.
You can shove those routines around, too, nudging somebody somewhere else entirely so you get a clean run at a locked room or an awkward conversation. Clues turn up in alleys, in documents, in notes left lying where they shouldn't be, and it all ends up on a Thinking Board where you piece the timeline back together before you point the finger.
The Posthumous Investigation is out now on Android, while an iOS version is on the way soon as well.
While you wait for that one, our list of the best detective games on iOS has plenty of culprits who only need catching once.
