Overview
The atmosphere in The Silver Case is great. The world building is intriguing, the way the characters talk to each other is something special, and the presentation / gameplay charmed me instantly. It is an incredibly special video game, but The Silver Case is given an overwhelming amount of praise that it does not deserve. Me, and many others, are valuing style over substance and uniqueness over craft.
The Silver Case rides a strange line between wanting user interaction, and wanting none. Near the start you get to explore around and solve puzzles, but this becomes less and less overtime. This also reflects the mysteries within the game. As you are playing a detective, you would expect to be piecing together mysteries yourself, but the game is largely waiting around as the characters explain what happened to you. Near the end this becomes more tolerable as The Silver Case becomes a game that is reliant on a vast amount of information that exists for the purpose of being shocking. At the start it's a bit more grating; Case 2, Spectrum, certainly felt like a weak point.
I started to really enjoy The Silver Case from Case 3 onward, but I still found many points of it frustrating. It is much too into itself, and its extreme edge makes its more loving points hard to take seriously.
When I first finished the game, I would go so far as to say I disliked The Silver Case. With time, I have grown to appreciate it, largely due to the way it has stuck in my mind. The Silver Case is a game that is structured to be disappointing and not have true catharsis. This makes it frustrating to level with if you are not fully on board, but I honestly do have respect for pieces of media that willingly make themselves unsatisfying, especially if it has a point.
The Silver Case is almost a video game that's about nothing; it shifts around throwing ideas in and out, and is purposefully obtuse for the sake of intrigue. Due to all of this, it becomes a video game about everything. You can spend hours dissecting points of this game that come to mean very little in the end. I have to admire its desperation and obtuseness, since I think I would fall into similar pitfalls as a writer.
I have grown to honestly love The Silver Case. I would have given the game 5/5 if my only issues were the lack of concreteness. I can get past how disgustingly full of itself The Silver Case is, but I don't think I can get past how the female characters are treated.
Misogyny
I have played many misogynist games. I like many misogynist games. I complain about it often, but I can tune it out. The Silver Case is intolerable. It's hard to ignore how every woman is written with the key character trait of being a woman. When a woman shows up, she will be killed, raped, flirted with, or called a broad. No matter the case, if a woman is on-screen, the most important thing for the player to know is that she is a woman.
The annoying thing is, I feel like I am at a disadvantage complaining about the misogyny, as I think there was a point there about the mistreatment of women.
In Case 2 Hachisuka's mistreatment is very on the nose, she is reprimanded for fighting back against the sexual harassment she faces and she is the one forced to apologize in the end. The Silver Case even pokes a little fun at the way misogynist media treats PMS.
It was a chapter with a large focus on workplace mistreatment of women, but at the end of the day it feels like Hachisuka, and women as a whole, are largely at the brunt of the joke. There could have been room to let Hachisuka be right for once, but the game is more interested in having her berated.
I don't want to have to shadow box with The Silver Case. Maybe it was saying something in its overwhelming amount of cryptic dialog in its attempt to be the coolest thing ever, and maybe I'm stupid for not realizing it. The women are pushed into the dirt with no chance to stand for themselves. It's hard to take the game in good faith on satirizing how women are treated, as it has never taken the moment to show that it actually cares about women.
At the end of the day, I have played a couple Grasshopper games now. After three games of watching women be raped, tortured, killed, victimized, viewed as sex first, put down, and treated like foreign creatures, I think it's fair enough to say that I don't think Grasshopper holds any respect for women! That's very disappointing, too, since it undercuts many of the things they want to say. If The Silver Case wanted to make a point about misogyny, it simply did a bad job and is completely indistinguishable from the worst kind of misogynist.
In its absolute desperate attempt to be cool, The Silver Case leans over to you and tries to tell you the secret of women. The trick to be irresistible, the trick of how women operate differently than men on a fundamental level. It's laughably wrong in a way that could be charming if it was inoffensive and not at the expense of women.
Just as its obtuseness creates a vagueness between nothing and everything, it also gives The Silver Case a cover for many criticisms. It could be said all the bad points are intentional and are a secret showcase of brilliance; it is honestly disrespectful towards The Silver Case to paint it in such a light.
The Silver Case is not a masterpiece with everything figured out. It is honestly a mess and completely overindulgent with itself. And it would not have been nearly as good if it was not an overindulgent mess.
Credits
Hachisuka's portrait was from a screenshot taken by me during my playthrough.