CRIMESIGHT Gameplay Preview

CRIMESIGHT is what you get if you mix the board game Clue with Among Us. The setting is sometime in the future where complex AIs control everything. The AI known as Sherlock is responsible for predicting future crimes, a setting much like the one in Minority Report. A rogue AI known as Moriarty is up to no good, try to subvert Sherlock and bring chaos into the world. Up to four players control characters while trying to figure out who the villain and target are, except one of the players is working with Moriarty and controlling the villain.

It turns into a cerebral game of cat and mouse. The rules are as follows, for the villain to successfully pull off the crime they must meet all three of the following requirements. The villain must have a weapon in possession, the villain must be in the same room as the target, and no witnesses can be within line of sight.

The player working with Moriarty can control everyone except for the target character. If players working with Sherlock and the player working with Moriarty input commands to the same character, Moriarty’s commands will always have the higher priority. This information can be used to help determine which characters may be the potential villain as well as which characters are not the target since Moriarty cannot control the target.

In addition to this, each character has a hunger meter. They must find and eat food regularly or else the number of tiles they can move will be reduced. This would not be ideal for both the villain and the target. This creates the need to be constantly scavenging the area for food while being on guard against possible villains.

Every turn, all players take control of a character and move them. Since it would be very confusing to have multiple players trying to control the same character, the game has built in communication emotes to let others know your intent. Usually a player will indicate they want to control a certain character and other players can either approve or deny that request.

As the game progresses through multiple rounds, the Sherlock AI will give a report every few turns on if the villain and target are within 3 tiles of each other. The game will indicate this with arrows if you press the tab key. The game will show the possible targets of a certain character if they were hypothetically the villain with outgoing arrows. The game will also show you the possible villains targeting that certain character were they the hypothetical target with incoming arrows. You can use all of this information to help determine who the villain and target are.

The game sounds very simple but there are so many mind games one can employ. For example, in my first game, it was a 1v1 match. The player working with Moriarty could move two characters, while I could move three. Players working with Moriarty can see the location of all weapon and food items, while the players working with Sherlock can only see that an item exists there, but not what the specific item is.

Right from the get go, the other player took control over a character from me and moved it immediately to a weapon. They also proceeded to control another character to procure a weapon and made movements that were highly suspicious. To make a long story short, I moved the three remaining characters into a room to protect each other during the last round. As it turns out, one of the characters that they weren’t controlling was the villain and he was waiting this entire time for me to move them together. He then controlled the third character and moved them out of the room and committed the crime. I was out played!

Overall, CRIMESIGHT is a very accessible and intuitive game with a pretty high skill ceiling. There are so many ways to outplay and outsmart your opponents, all incredibly satisfying if you manage to pull it off.