Cop games tend to lose interest in criminals the moment they’re in custody. The sort of tense interview suite tussles that loom large in this short but ingenious £2 grill-em-up seldom get ludologised and when they do it’s rarely with this level of subtlety or insight.
Solving crimes isn’t always your goal in demo-equipped Interrogation Simulator. In several of the eight gritty cases on offer, you start with a single suspect and heaps of damning evidence. You know the person sitting across the table from you is guilty. Your goal is to get them to admit it.
Extracting a mea culpa requires a cunning mixture of honey and vinegar. Keep the interviewee sweet and talkative with classic ‘good cop’ techniques, then, when they’ve inadvertently revealed the chinks in their armour and the inconsistencies in their story, pivot into ‘bad cop’ mode, applying pressure until they spill beans.
The choice of colour-coded questions on the right-hand side of the screen changes as an interrogation proceeds. Which questions you can deploy depends on your current relationship with the suspect – the ‘Rapport’ and ‘Pressure’ levels. Usually an approach that builds Rapport will decrease Pressure, but sometimes it’s possible to find a line of questioning that simultaneously boosts both or only impacts one. Ideally you want to end up facing a person who a) knows the game is up, and b) isn’t so scared or hostile towards you they’ve clammed up. Fail to read an interviewee’s character correctly – to understand their motivations and concerns – and the chance of obtaining a confession is slim.
Simming interrogations without reducing them to drab, formulaic puzzles isn’t easy. Otis Miller deserves credit and sales for achieving this tricky feat, and for providing one of the wittiest and best-integrated help systems I’ve come across in a long while. Struggling with a particular case? Assuming you’re brave enough and can win him over, you may be able to gain useful tips from the Hannibal Lecter-like ‘Alligator’, an ex police interrogator serving ten concurrent life sentences for a series of grisly murders.