Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders Review
The historical setting makes Casebook 1899 stand out as a detective adventure.
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders. Credit: Homo Narrans Studio
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders from Homo Narrans Studio is a point-and-click adventure game created in the VGA style of LucasArts and Sierra classics. You play as Detective Joseph Kreiser, solving a string of murders across four cases in 1899 Leipzig. I appreciate how grounded the game and its cases initially feel within their real-world historical setting. There's a genuine effort to create authentic period detail and logical detective work. Unfortunately, that feeling gets steadily undercut by the creeping intrusion of increasingly over-the-top adventure game nonsense puzzles that belong more in Monkey Island than a serious murder investigation.
Each case begins when Kreiser is summoned to a murder scene, where he meets local prosecutor Möbius, who becomes your companion throughout most of the game. As Kreiser, you examine and interact with the environment, pick up key items, and speak with witnesses and suspects. Everything Kreiser observes gets recorded in his notebook, which drives the most interesting gameplay mechanic in Casebook 1899.
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders. Credit: Homo Narrans Studio
The notebook serves two crucial functions in solving cases. When you exhaust conversation topics with a character, you can open the notebook to ask them about statements gathered from other people, cross-referencing testimonies to catch contradictions or uncover new leads. More importantly, the notebook is the central hub for your detective deductions. By combining statements, Kreiser can deduce new observations that open up fresh avenues of investigation or create nodes on the mind map you will use to formalize your solution. On these nodes, you make binary choices that reorganize the connections between the nodes, leading to your final determination of the culprit, their motivation, and details about the crime. It's a satisfying system that makes you feel like an actual detective piecing together evidence rather than just clicking through dialogue trees.
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders. Credit: Homo Narrans Studio
The game also features traditional item-based puzzles, which get progressively sillier as you advance and actively undercut the tone and realism the game established. Early puzzles feel reasonable, using tools in logical ways. But later? You're using a fountain to launch a stone that knocks over a magpie nest. You're gluing biscuit crumbs to a chimney topper. You're interpreting a musical note based on the position of a bird in a cage. The final case, which connects all the previous murders into a larger conspiracy, abandons grounded detective work entirely for esoteric riddle-style puzzles. It becomes the cliche of a villain teasing and testing a master detective—think Riddler and Batman. The difficulty spike in these final puzzles feels jarring compared to everything that came before, and the shift in tone from serious historical murder mystery to campy adventure game theatrics damages the experience.
Your sidekick Möbius serves as the game's hint system, and he's essential. You can ask him for help with puzzles or have him highlight all interactive hotspots on the screen, features I used extensively. He's not with you in the final case, and I sorely missed his presence. Quality-of-life features like hotspot marking should be available at all times in modern point-and-click games. Pixel hunting just isn't fun, and his absence made parts of the final case tedious. I spent too much time clicking around screens looking for the one obscure item I'd missed, rather than actually solving mysteries.
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders. Credit: Homo Narrans Studio
The VGA-style graphics are serviceable but somewhat ugly at their low resolution. The aesthetic feels rough around the edges in ways that don't seem entirely intentional; character animations are stiff, backgrounds lack life and detail, and the overall presentation feels more budget-limited than deliberately retro. The voice acting, however, adds considerable value to the game. All dialogue is performed in German with translated subtitles, which lends authenticity to the 1899 Leipzig setting. The performances are generally strong and help sell the more serious dramatic moments, even when the puzzles are asking you to do ridiculous things.
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders. Credit: Homo Narrans Studio
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders is a decent throwback adventure game that's enjoyable despite its identity crisis. The notebook-based deduction system is genuinely clever. I just wish the developers had committed to the grounded, realistic tone and puzzle design they initially established, rather than shifting into wacky adventure game logic by the end. Don’t get me wrong—I love the ridiculousness of games like Monkey Island. The realistic parts of this game are just far stronger in their execution. Still, I wouldn't mind joining Detective Kreiser in future adventures. Perhaps we'll get a Casebook 1900?
Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: Steam Deck
