Murder Mystery: Forty-Eight Silences

48 deaths. One city. Every accusation needs proof.

Welcome to Ordanholt, a rain-soaked port city built around a disaster nobody wants to remember. As an investigator with the Office of Unresolved Deaths, reopen its forgotten cases and follow the connections between them.

Murder Mystery: Forty-Eight Silences is a 2D detective game about reading closely, comparing accounts and making a case. Explore illustrated locations, collect records, examine archived testimony and test your deductions. Each murder has its own solution; together, the cases reveal a larger story.

Do the detective work

• Explore the case. Move between illustrated scenes and open evidence markers to examine documents.
• Follow contradictions. Compare records side by side, search within passages and return to their sources.
• Build your own theory. Pin evidence, arrange your board, connect records and keep notes with citations.
• Prove your deductions. Work through investigation tasks and support an accusation with evidence.
• Decide what happens next. Your choices shape the consequences for the city and its people. The identity of each culprit remains grounded in that case's evidence.

A connected campaign

Follow 48 investigations across eight districts, with 1,152 evidence records, 288 archived interviews, 240 deduction tasks and eight campaign endings. Visit 24 illustrated locations and return to previous investigations through the case archive.

Choose from three difficulty settings and take the time you need: there is no forced countdown. The separate Night Desk offers additional rule-based deduction exercises outside the main campaign.

Read, listen, investigate

Complete game text and interface in English, Italian, Spanish, French and German. Optional offline synthetic narration reads supported story and evidence passages in English, Italian, Spanish and French, with playback speed controls and reading-position support. German narration is not available. This is synthetic read-aloud, not an actor-performed voice cast.

Adjust text size, switch between paper and night reading, control music and sound, and resume your investigation with local saves. Campaign and custom-portrait exports provide separate personal backups.

Desktop edition

The downloads include a Windows installer and a Linux .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu-compatible 64-bit systems. Install the package for your operating system, then start Forty-Eight Silences from your applications menu or shortcut. No browser setup or ZIP extraction is required. After installation, the game works offline without a subscription or a separate game account.

Designed for a single player using mouse and keyboard. You can discuss the investigation together around the same screen; there are no networked multiplayer or separate co-op controls.

Content and creation

This fictional mystery discusses murder, bereavement, displacement, identity loss and institutional wrongdoing. It focuses on records and deduction rather than graphic injury imagery.

Writing, localization, artwork and code were developed with AI assistance and integrated by SelfNotesLab. Optional narration uses bundled offline speech synthesis to read fixed game passages. It does not generate new stories or accept free-form AI prompts. Music and other third-party components retain their credited licenses.

Licensed for personal, non-commercial play. No resale or redistribution of the game files. For support, use this project's comments or contact SelfNotesLab, including your operating system, game version and the problem encountered.