Statement Types
Eleven statement types live behind the scenes. Eight are passive and appear automatically. Three are active investigations you trigger by selecting one or more targets. Each innocent role uses exactly one type. Corrupt roles fall back to a generic lie producer when their disguised role would have spoken.
| Type | Role | Kind | What it says |
|---|---|---|---|
| declare_innocent | Mayor | Passive | Names one official as innocent. |
| pair_alignment | Vice Mayor | Passive | Points to two officials and claims at least one is corrupt. Never points to two corrupt officials. |
| distance_to_corrupt | City Planner | Passive | Reports the circular distance to the nearest corrupt official. |
| corrupt_adjacent | Council Chair | Passive | Yes or no: are any two corrupt officials seated side by side? |
| blackmailed_count | HR Director | Passive | Counts how many innocent officials are currently being forced to lie. |
| adjacent_has_corrupt | Police Chief | Passive | Yes or no: is at least one neighbour corrupt? |
| longest_clean_chain | IT Director | Passive | Reports the longest unbroken run of innocent seats. |
| verify_truth | Legal Advocate | Active | One target. Reports whether they are currently lying or telling the truth. |
| count_corrupt_in_three | Finance Director | Active | Three targets. Counts how many of them are corrupt. |
| same_alignment_pair | Zoning Director | Active | Two targets. Reports whether they share alignment. |
| lie | All corrupt roles | Passive | Generic lie producer. Fires whenever a corrupt role's disguised identity would have spoken truthfully. |
Truth vs Lies
Every official at the table has a fixed lie status decided at the start of the case: telling the truth, lying or silent. The status does not jitter between refreshes. A truthful innocent stays truthful unless a Blackmailer is forcing them. A lying corrupt stays lying. A silenced official stays silent until the Silencer is arrested.
Alignment is not the same as lie status
A blackmailed innocent official is producing false statements but is still innocent for the purposes of arrest. The Legal Advocate's verify ability checks lie status: it will flag a blackmailed innocent as "lying." The Finance Director's count and the Zoning Director's pair check alignment: they will both treat that same blackmailed innocent as innocent.
Conflating the two is the most common way to lose a case. An investigation result is a statement too: it is only reliable if the investigator is honest. From an honest Legal Advocate, "lying" means the target is corrupt or blackmailed and "telling the truth" means innocent. If the Legal Advocate is lying, both verdicts flip. Neither verdict is a confession on its own.
Statements lock at start
Some statements need a chosen target or chosen lie value. To prevent you from rerolling by waiting for refreshes, the game decides these once and reuses them all game. That includes the Mayor's innocent target, the Vice Mayor's pair, the City Planner's lie value, the HR Director's lie count, the IT Director's lie chain length, the Silencer's victim and the Converter's victim.
Only Silencer ends on arrest
When the Silencer is arrested the muted target plays a "freed" animation and resumes producing statements. Blackmail and Manipulation are different: those effects persist for the rest of the case even after the corrupt card is arrested.
Annotations
The annotation system is local to you. The game does not read your stamps or ribbons. They exist as a place to externalise your deductions so the board carries the case for you instead of your memory.
Note Stamps
Right-click a card to cycle through five stamp states. While hovering a card you can also set a stamp directly with Q, W, E or R; pressing the same key again clears it. These are default bindings and can be changed in Settings > Controls.
- None: the default. Nothing on the card.
- Innocent (Q): green stamp. You believe this official is innocent.
- Corrupt (W): red stamp. You are confident this seat should be arrested when the timing is right.
- 50/50 (E): half red, half green stamp. Two candidates for one slot and you cannot yet tell which.
- Suspicious (R): yellow stamp. Something is off, but you do not yet have an innocent read.
Color Ribbons
Middle-click a card to cycle through five ribbon states, or press 1, 2, 3 or 4 while hovering it to set pink, blue, orange or white directly. Like the stamp inputs, these are default bindings you can change in Settings > Controls. Ribbons are deliberately abstract, with no in-game meaning. Use them however you want: by Vice Mayor pair, by Finance Director group, by neighbourhood, by anything.
- None · the default.
- Pink
- Blue
- Orange
- White
Arresting
Press the arrest button (Space by default) to enter arrest mode, then click the official you want to arrest. Pressing it again before clicking cancels. The card flips to its true identity and the wrong-arrest counter ticks up if the arrested seat was innocent. Other statements do not change: they describe the table as it was dealt, and an arrested official still counts for distances, neighbours and innocent chains. The one exception is the Silencer: arresting it frees its target, who starts speaking.
Bulk arrest
When you are sure of several officials at once, press B (by default) or right-click the arrest button to enter bulk arrest mode. Click cards to mark them and click a marked card again to unmark it. Click the arrest button or press B again to arrest every marked official; with nothing marked, the same press closes the mode. The arrest key (Space by default) does not confirm: it cancels bulk arrest mode and clears every mark. Arrests run one by one in seat order and stop as soon as one of them ends the case, so marks after a losing arrest are never used. Bulk marks are separate from note stamps: stamping a card does not mark it.
Wrong arrests
A wrong arrest is any arrested official whose true alignment is innocent. Blackmailed innocents, framed innocents (when the role exists in the build) and the Mayor all count as wrong. Three wrong arrests in a single case lose the level.
In a campaign run the wrong-arrest counter is per-level: each level starts with three lives. Losing the level ends the run. There is no global wrong-arrest pool that carries across levels.
Win and Lose
How you win
- Arrest every corrupt official at the table. The case closes the moment the last corrupt goes down.
- In Endless Mode every cleared level pushes you into the next one, so there is no terminal win.
How you lose
- Three wrong arrests in a level (see Arresting above).
- Arresting an innocent Mayor at any point. Instant loss.
- Losing a campaign level ends the run. No retry, no checkpoint, the save is deleted. Abandoning from the pause menu also ends the run; quitting to the main menu mid-level is safe and resumes from the same arrest state when you reload.
Seeds and Level Codes
Every table is generated from a seed, so the same seed always produces the same puzzles. That makes runs and single tables shareable.
- Run seed: the whole campaign. The pause menu shows it as "Run"; click it to copy. Your Run History also lists the seed of every past run. To play a seed, right-click New Run in the main menu and choose Add Seed.
- Level code: one table, with its player count, corrupt roles and difficulty. The pause menu shows it as "Level"; click it to copy. Paste it into the Seed field of Custom Game to play that exact table. The first campaign level has no level code.
- Limits: share codes between players on the same game version. A code that needs content your edition does not include, such as a difficulty or corrupt role the demo does not have, is refused with "This code is not available in this version". In a multiplayer match the pause menu hides both codes; the seed is revealed on Final Standings.
Difficulty Modes
Two modes are currently in play: Easy and Normal. Difficulty only changes how strict the table is. Which corrupt roles can appear is a separate setting: in the campaign it follows the act, in Custom Game you pick it yourself. The demo offers Easy only.
| Aspect | Easy | Normal |
|---|---|---|
| Arrested cards as ability and professional targets | Yes | No |
| Corrupt roles shown in briefing | Yes | Yes |
| Campaign act that uses it | Act I | Act II |
In Easy mode, abilities can target arrested officials, which lets you keep using the chamber as a workspace after a card has been resolved. In Normal an arrested card is removed from the targetable pool entirely.
Visual Style
The game has two looks, Classic and Pixel. It asks which one you want the first time you open it, and you can change it anytime in Settings > Display > Visual Style. The look never changes the puzzle: every table, statement and rule is the same in both.
- Pixel draws the act chambers, cards, icons, seals, table effects, main menu and splash screen in pixel art and always uses the pixel art portraits.
- Classic keeps the illustrated look and lets you pick any portrait set under Portraits. Choosing the pixel art set there gives pixel faces at an illustrated table.
- A change made during a run appears from the next level.
- Smooth Pixel Scaling (Settings > Display) only affects the Pixel style. Normally each pixel is scaled up by a whole-number factor; with it on, the table scales freely and pixel edges become slightly softer.
- Text and panels stay sharp in both styles.
- Both styles are in the demo and in Early Access on Windows and Mac. The browser version has the Classic look only.