Confidential Killings – A Detective Game is a stylized noir mystery that places players in the role of a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in late1970s Hollywood. From the outset, it leans heavily into atmosphere. The visuals are moody and deliberately stylized rather than photorealistic, and the dark, jazzy soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting in establishing tone. It feels like a pulp crime novel brought to life, complete with shadowy crime scenes, unsettling discoveries and a pervasive sense that nothing is quite what it seems. Confidential Killings on the Steam platform was recently featured during their Detective Fest, and it really ended up being a good representative title for that entire genre.
Gameplay in Confidential Killings is primarily point-and-click and heavily text-driven, but it’s more involved than simply clicking on everything until the game advances. Each crime scene is effectively its own narrative puzzle. Clicking on objects, bodies, weapons or characters brings up detailed descriptions, and within those descriptions are highlighted keywords. Those keywords are also clickable, and when you do, they are added to your lexicon, which functions as both a clue repository and the building blocks for reconstructing what actually happened.
This creates a two-layered investigative loop. On one level, you are hunting for the correct keywords needed to complete the narrative framework of each case. If a victim was poisoned, for example, you must uncover the relevant poison or method before Confidential Killings will allow you to complete that portion of the scene’s reconstruction. On another level, you are piecing together context. Knowing why someone was present, how they were connected to another character or what their motive might have been is just as important as having the correct vocabulary in your lexicon. Even with all the right words available, you still need to understand the logic of the crime to put everything in the correct order.
This style of deduction will feel familiar to players who have enjoyed narrative-driven mystery games like The Case of the Golden Idol or the more lighthearted Duck Detective. Compared to those titles, Confidential Killings is generally more forgiving. The logical leaps required to solve individual cases are usually smaller, and in some situations it is possible to brute-force a solution by cycling through available keywords once they have all been discovered. A few of the murder scenarios feel slightly undercooked in terms of believable motives or murder planning, but Confidential Killings rarely becomes frustrating as a result.
The one place where it kind of stumbles for those who take their sleuthing seriously is in the logic presented during some of the investigations. There are scenarios at individual crime scenes where more than one person could easily be the killer, or where the perpetrator’s motive is unclear or undefined even after all the evidence is uncovered. In those cases, you may have to mix and match different names in the main panel until you stumble on the correct solution. Casual players probably won’t care, but there is enough of a disconnect to annoy those who pride themselves on being master detectives in mystery games like this.
Where Confidential Killings distinguishes itself versus a lot of other similar titles is in its broader narrative structure. Rather than presenting a collection of disconnected cases, it slowly reveals that each murder is part of a larger web of corruption tied to Hollywood’s criminal underbelly. As you progress, it becomes clear that a central figure is orchestrating events from the shadows, controlling the drug trade built around a substance known as GAZE and using intermediaries, false identities and manipulated relationships to keep their hands clean.
This overarching plot gives the investigation real momentum. Even when individual cases are resolved, there is a lingering sense that you are only seeing one piece of a much larger puzzle. Between investigations, players are returned to their office where they can look at a big board with photos of various victims and crime scenes. Classic strings of yarn connect various people and places, which serves as a clue that you are actually piecing together something much larger than just the plot of a murder committed by a jealous lover or a killing among drug dealers.
The presentation quality for Confidential Killings remains strong throughout the entire experience. The writing is concise but evocative, and the noir tone rarely slips. While the puzzles may not reach the complexity of some of its genre peers, the consistency of the atmosphere and the way each case feeds into the central conspiracy keeps the experience engaging.
Confidential Killings may not be the most demanding detective game on the market, but it’s a confident and stylish one. It balances accessibility with narrative ambition, making it a good entry point for players curious about deduction-focused titles while still offering enough intrigue to satisfy fans of the genre. For those who enjoy slowly unraveling conspiracies, assembling meaning from fragments and inhabiting a grimy noir world, Confidential Killings delivers a solid and compelling investigation.