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The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is an FMV murder mystery set in Japan during three different time periods. Player character Haruka Kagami, a writer of crime fiction, is asked to help solve a series of murders connected to the Shijima family and a mysterious fruit which could hold the key to eternal youth.
Each chapter contains three main phases of gameplay. First you’ll watch events unfold in live action video clips, then you’ll arrange clues within Haruka’s mind palace, and finally you’ll confront the suspects with evidence to prove who is guilty.
Story is interesting, very detailed and has lots of twists. It took me 14 hours to finish, including possibly the longest post credit scene ever filmed. The acting is very good, especially because the actors play different characters in each time period (1922, 1972, and 2022). I’d recommend watching with Japanese voices and English subtitles. I briefly tried the English voice dub but the main characters sounded completely emotionless, so I quickly switched back.
Unfortunately the detective part of the gameplay wasn’t as good. The game will present the player with questions, and you need to drag clues onto the grid to form hypotheses which will identify possible suspects, murder weapons, motives, and alibis. There isn’t really any way to fail this part because the game will automatically highlight when you’ve placed a clue in the correct position, so while you can work out some of it logically, when stuck you can solve with trial and error.
You’ll unlock lots of different hypotheses, and quite often there will be multiple that directly contradict each other, some will seem plausible, others will seem completely ridiculous. During this stage I often felt like I had a good idea of which hypotheses were correct and incorrect.
But then during the final stage when Haruka is confronting the suspects and the player must choose which hypotheses to present as evidence, a key part of each murder case involved some kind of twist that hadn’t even been mentioned as a possibility during the previous stage, which left me wondering “how was I supposed to know about that?”.
Thankfully you’re not penalised too harshly for making an incorrect choice. You’ll see a short video clip of Haruka looking confused, then you can go back and make a different choice without losing any progress. But it just doesn’t feel great to go through this whole process and still get things wrong.
I also have to mention that towards the end, the game suddenly turns into the worst escape room puzzle I’ve ever played for almost an entire chapter.
The Centennial Case is definitely worth playing for the story, which is the best of any FMV game I’ve played, but because of those gameplay flaws I would recommend waiting for a sale.