I've yet to dabble in this new wave of Sinocentric games to hit Steam over the past few years, the world's most populous country having joined the global video game industry in earnest just semi-recently, but if the likes of Sword and Fairy or Gujian are as charming as this adventure game (from a Canadian development team, but still kinda counts) set in 7th/8th century China I might find myself drawn to one sooner rather than later. Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is a 2019 traditional point-and-click detective game, which means that it'll occasionally interrupt you from picking up random trash and using it on hotspots to ask you who you think the culprit is and why and how they did it. In that vein it's not dissimilar to a Gabriel Knight or Wadjet's Blackwell series; by demonstrating that you are able to follow what happened, the game rewards not only your resourcefulness but your comprehension skills.

Detective Di is based on a real person: Di Renjie, an investigator (and later politician) that could be said to be China's version of Sherlock Holmes, but for the fact he actually existed. He's the eponymous character in a number of movies and TV shows, usually named something like Detective Dee or Judge Dee instead. This game sees him as a young man early in his career: talented but untested, thrown into a dangerous cat-and-mouse chase with a serial killer targeting women with shadowy pasts. The first, apparently-unrelated case has Di solve a murder at a clandestine site where plans to hash out a peace treaty between China and Korea were taking place. Successfully solving this case grants Di his bona fides, leading to a cushy position as the investigating magistrate (like a police chief) of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang'an working directly under Empress Wu, another extraordinary real-life figure as China's only (legitimate) female monarch. The murders that follow are grisly: each woman is found strangled and posthumously mutilated, their hearts removed, with a silk rose left behind as a calling card. Each of the game's chapters involves filling a board of deductions—important clues—and using the completed set to assemble the denouement, each chapter getting Di closer to the killer.

If I'm being honest, the game might be a tad on the easy side. Part of that is due to otherwise positive developments in modernized old-school adventure games; specifically, how the game never throws too many items or hotspots at you to worry about at any one juncture, so even if you are unable to glean the solution from context alone the tried-and-true process of elimination isn't exactly an arduous one. However, Detective Di is also a very straightforward game when it comes to signposting and when to use items without any kind of moon logic puzzles to get in the way, though you do occasionally have to follow irrelevant side-objectives like rescuing a cat to get an NPC to talk to you. Likewise, there's a few puzzles of the Professor Layton variety that might involve deciphering a riddle or finding a password under a set of rules, but they're pretty mild. There's one involving a Go/Othello board I thought was clever and took a few minutes, except the hint for that one really was kinda staring me in the face if I'm being frank about my own meager puzzle-solving talents. The very simple graphics, erring closer to 8-bit than 16-bit where characters even lack faces, might also be considered a detriment given how important facial expressions and the like are to a detective's keen intuition and emotional intelligence but could occasionally still be striking in the backdrops of certain zones.

However, none of this really serves to detract too much from what is a well-written and intriguing whodunnit adventure game with an uncommon ancient China setting to set it apart from its peers. There's nuances aplenty behind the culprit's actions and the politics behind this choice of victims, even if they're far from a sympathetic character, and the player is free to play Di as a cynical pragmatist or someone a little softer and empathetic given his ongoing nightmares about those he was unable to save. The game also feels built for sequels, introducing a side-cast of allies like the seasoned and ornery Coroner Yao or the helpful and honest Lieutenant "Lucky" Ma, so I hope the developers decide to make more games in this series with a bit more challenge, leaving this first game to serve as an ideal onboarding point for those interested in interactive detective stories but maybe aren't so versed in games (and specifically adventure games, with all their illogical foibles). I could definitely see this being a worthy detective China Noir ("Chinoir"?) franchise further down the silk road with a bit more presentational confidence (and ideally a beefier length) supporting its current level of writing talent.

Rating: 4 out of 5.