New Losago, 1929 – a town full of creeps, clowns, mobsters, and, if you know where to look, the occasional honest citizen. Guide private investigator Lanson Rose through a series of puzzling cases: solve the city's liquor supply problem in "Speakeasy Street", track down a missing food scientist in "The Big Pickle", and investigate strange goings-on under a dilapidated mansion in "A Study in Squid". A text adventure with a mobile-friendly clickable interface.

You can play online for free by clicking "Run Game" above, or download the game and feelies for $5 - with the feelies are a high-quality map of the game, two pages of designer's notes, and a bonus newsstand detective magazine containing two short stories.

  • 🏆 1st place in the 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition
  • 🎀🎀🎀🎀🎀🎀 Nominated in six categories (Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Implementation, Best Use of Innovation, Best Use of Multimedia) in the 2016 Xyzzy Awards

"Silly, noir-themed goodness that never takes itself terribly seriously" - Rock Paper Shotgun

"Traditional adventure game puzzles that are unfailingly amusing and well-constructed" - Giant Bomb

"Besides Devil Daggers and Firewatch this is my Game Of The Year" - Cara Ellison

"One of the best games in a new wave of modern interactive fiction titles" - Classic Adventurer

StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars
(13 total ratings)
AuthorRobin Johnson
GenreInteractive Fiction, Puzzle
Tags1920s, Detective, Mystery, Narrative, Noir, Point & Click, text-adventure, Text based
Average sessionAbout an hour
LanguagesEnglish
InputsMouse, Touchscreen
AccessibilityBlind friendly

Purchase

Buy Now$5.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Map of New Losago 2 MB
Astonishing Tales of Astonishment 627 kB
Designer's notes 45 kB
detectiveland_dl.zip 6 MB

Development log

Comments

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Hi, I love your point and click games, but I can never get them to save and restore. They seem to save, and sometimes it is possible to restore a few times, but sometime during a session my saved games always vanish. Is this to do with my cookie settings? I use Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPhone. (High Sierra on Mac, iOS 15.8 on iPhone). 

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are all your games accessible? and, do they all have typing?

I believe all the interactive fiction games are accessible because they are text-based and run in the browser, so should be compatible with any screenreader. They don't all require typing—Draculaland, Zeppelin Adventure, Pirateship, and The Party Line use the same link/button-based interface as Detectiveland here. Gruesome, Hamlet, Portcullis, The Xylophoniad, and Aunts and Butlers  are text-based browser games, so should still work with screenreaders, but do require typed input from the player (like NORTH or TAKE CUCUMBER or PUT TEA IN TEACUP.) The graphical puzzle games (Zookoban, Block Pushing Time Travel Game, Homicidal Robots Inc, Soul Pusher) and the Bitsy mini-game (Bicycle Centaurs) are probably not accessible if you can't see the pictures, sorry about that.

this game has the blind-friendly tag. is the windows version of the game blind accessible?

Are you not finding the web version blind-friendly? I thought it was because, as a text-based game that runs in the browser, it should be usable with a screen reader. A blind player did verify this some time ago, but please let me know if it's not your experience.

The Windows version is similarly all text/HTML, essentially running in an offline browser, so should work with a screen reader. Again, please let me know if you find it's not the case and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks!

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Cool game. And web-version is free! Why? Author is too kind!

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Superb

This type of game is wonderful ! Have you ever thought of making a game engine out of it ? Is it possible to freely use versifier.js and con versifier.js to make our own games ? Thanks !

Thank you! I would like to release it as an engine one day but haven't had the time or focus yet. Feel free to grab the source and play around if you like, though.

Thank’youn! And about the engine, think’about it !!

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Love the format for this game and how accessible it makes text adventures. The writing is a lot of fun too!

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I really enjoyed playing this game! I've never done IF in this format before. I like how it removes syntax and its just puzzle-solving and a fun, funny story. Looking forward to trying the others.