You are Jane Blue. After graduating from college, you joined the police force as a ‘Team Leader’. While the officers under you go out to investigate and arrest suspects, you make the big picture calls. Do you charge someone with a crime? If so, what? If not, why? As you make these decisions, it is up to you to negotiate with higher ups and deal with schemes from the officers below you.
Can you navigate the politics of city government and the complexities of the legal system? Or will you sacrifice one in favor of the other?
“They say human rights are God-given…”
Legal Dungeon plays out in three distinct types of stage.
Between cases, you have dialogues. Those often take the place of one of your officers, mostly a sergeant, speaking to you. You never talk. He clearly hears something, though, so I’m not sure why I never talk. These dialogues are intended to flesh out the world and your place in it. Given that this is an alternate reality, it should be helpful to have these glimpses at the outside world. However, because the dialogue is purely one-sided, it is harder to parse than it should be.
One neat touch, however, is the lack of portraits. Instead, each character is represented by their rank on a hierarchical flow chart. You know the officers below you are hungry for promotion. You know the officers above you will have suggestions and demands that you can’t easily ignore. It urges you, in a way, not to think of them as people, but as cogs in a justice machine. And if the cogs are this broken, it asks, what does it mean for the machine overall?
Afterward the dialogues, you have case files. Rather than investigating yourself, your job is simple: You read the statements from the witnesses and arresting officers and pull out the relevant information. Who is the suspect? What are they charged with? Are there witnesses? You mark down relevant laws, check criminal history, and make sure everyone’s information is properly documented. Sometimes, you’ll get instant messages from officers asking you questions, but most of what you are doing here is reading.
Finally, you have the titular ‘legal dungeon’. There, you go one-on-one with the suspect. Weirdly, you have to do this even if you decide not to indict. (More on that later.) Your job here is to find the pieces of information from the suspect’s testimony that meet certain legal criteria and use those to ‘crack’ their story. However, you both have ‘hit points’. If you score a good legal point, their HP goes down. Make a mistake in the interrogation, however, and yours does. When either hits 0, the interrogation ends and the case is referred to the courts — and, if you lost, you are fired on the spot.
“… but heaven doesn’t care about our rights.”
It’s a cool idea, right? A little bit Papers Please, a little bit Phoenix Wright. Unfortunately, the mechanics don’t work the way you might hope. Take, for instance, the game’s third case. Content warning for discussion of suicide in this section.
John Bright, a local nurse, is accused of aiding and abetting in the suicide of another man, Reese. Bright met Reese on a forum and sold him suicide pills. Bright acknowledges that he posted about the sale on the forum and that he communicated with Reese about the sale. However, he claims that he was just ripping Reese off the cost of the pills, figuring he wouldn’t go to the police about the scam since he had been trying to buy illegal drugs. Indeed, he claims that he never met or spoke to Reese, even though you have phone logs that prove that he did.
But here’s the catch: You can’t click on those phone logs. The game doesn’t let you. You have caught him in a lie, but the game won’t allow you to acknowledge that. Likewise, you have considerable circumstantial evidence that a meeting did take place — but because you can only select one piece of text as your evidence here, you are explicitly forbidden from drawing connections. And you can prove conclusively that fraud did take place, because he admits it. But are can’t mention fraud, only aiding and abetting suicide. The game doesn’t say why. You just can’t.
However, you also can’t half-ass letting him go! Eventually, I got sick of guessing. Nothing I clicked worked. It was obvious that the narrative wanted Bright to get away with it. So, I selected the text where Bright said he never met Reese. And Bright attacked me for it. Inexplicably, I had tried to enter into the record that he was innocent, but the game punished me because I didn’t guess the exact piece of text from a 22 page document they wanted me to select. I didn’t just have to create a defense for this person in order to not indict them; the game demanded that I create an airtight defense.
“We imbue our rights with our words and actions.”
There are myriad examples of this basic problem. In another case, I was asked to provide evidence that a suspect predicted a negative outcome. Inexplicably, I was not allowed to submit testimony saying that he was worried about that negative outcome. The game has no real feedback system, so I have no idea why it was rejected. It met the exact criteria. But because of the nature of the puzzles in the game, it’s impossible to tell if you are dealing with a bug or just a particularly obtuse puzzle. This happens over and over again. Asked to find contradictions in a suspect’s statements, I provide two contradictory responses — which the game does not accept. Why? I’ll never know.
There is a famous puzzle in the original King’s Quest. In it, to progress, you must guess the name of an old gnome. You can get a hint: He’s a very famous gnome, but you have to spell his name backwards. Now, asking players to guess the name of a famous gnome as Rumplestiltskin is already difficult. You might reasonably assume that if you typed in Nikstlitselpmur, you would have done more than enough to solve the riddle. But King’s Quest was largely written by a single person, and that simply wasn’t how her brain worked. Instead, you had to use a backwards alphabet, doing letter replacement with it. This spells Ifnkovhgroghprm.
For a generation of gamers, this served as one of the most needlessly obtuse puzzles in point-and-click adventure game history. In the years since, playtesting and writing teams have helped mitigate the odd specificity of those odd early solutions. But Legal Dungeon often feels like it never went through that system. This feels less like navigating a legal system and more like navigating the arcane corners of one stranger’s fantasy world. Paradise Killer updated the point-and-click adventure for a more modern, narrative gaming experience; Legal Dungeon is a true throwback, in the best and worst ways.
“So it’s a waste to even acknowledge that monster’s rights.”
There is, of course, a caveat: I am quite stupid. Well, okay, not stupid necessarily. But I’m certainly not good at a very particular kind of logic. And while I’d argue that the puzzles here are far too finicky for their own good, there’s also the fact that the law is a realm that requires that particular sort of logic. Perhaps you excel at logic puzzles. That may make a difference.
But I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the game, developed and released by a Korean company, was translated poorly. There are plenty of examples of sentences that don’t quite make sense, or times when the game asks you to do something you cannot actually do. For instance, at one point the game told me to select “Crimes Subject to Victim’s Request” as the applicable law. This is not a law. It is a precedent. Consequently, you cannot charge someone with it. The game physically will not allow you to do so.
Translation is complex. I get that. But in a game that is all about word problems and logic puzzles, improper translation causes a considerable amount of disruption. I am not talking about small errors, either. At one point late in the game, unclear language completely reversed the outcome of a case. Logic puzzles demand crystal clear language; Legal Dungeon doesn’t deliver.
“We don’t seem to be the heroes of this game.”
It’s pretty obvious early on what Legal Dungeon is doing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The hook, a text-based puzzle game about the manipulation of the justice system by the police, is a good one. As with Papers Please, the game pushes you to think in systems. It is easy to go into a game like Papers Please thinking that you won’t slip into corruption. But Lucas Pope built Papers Please to make you realize that systems of oppression are bigger than individual choices. And I like that! It’s a kind of storytelling that can really only exist in games. They force you to make the decisions, often under pressure, that seem so easy to someone reading about events weeks later and a thousand miles away.
Legal Dungeon wants to do that. But Papers Please was crystal clear about its stakes. You have a kid. The kid gets sick. How will you pay for it? In Legal Dungeon, SOMI have tried to create an entire fictional criminal justice system. I am more than halfway through the game and I genuinely do not understand the arcane legal and political machinations I’m supposedly engaging in. Was I playing politics, masterminding my promotion. Promotion to what? How? At one point, a character I barely knew gave my department a bunch of imaginary points. This rare intervention shocked my underlings. It completely turned our rating around. How? No idea.
And this gets at the weakness of Legal Dungeon. The game wants to demonstrate how a legal system that rewards incarceration over justice will inherently corrupt itself. But you never feel like you have a choice here. If you catch someone who has committed fraud but the game wants you to charge them with murder, you must charge them with murder. In the real world, the police can and do simply frame people. They throw people in prison because they know the person can’t afford the bail to get out. Because the puzzles here are so obtuse, the game sends the opposite message at times: The police want to help, but the aw-golly complexities of the legal system tied their hands. And when your story about systemic corruption of justice sends messages that wildly divergent, you have a serious problem.