Crime scene: today's case

How a crime scene works

1. Look at the picture before you touch it. The scene is painted, not generated, and everything in it was put there by somebody who knew the answer.
2. Tap a thing. If it is one of the five that explain what happened, it rings and lifts into the evidence strip below the picture.
3. If it is not, it says what it is and dims. That is the whole punishment: a fence post that has been there for years tells you it has been there for years. There is no buzzer, no miss counter and no timer anywhere in this game.
4. Tapping bare grass does nothing but ripple where you touched. Tapping a wall is not a guess, so it is not treated as one.
5. After three taps that find nothing, a Look closer button appears under the picture. It is free and it always will be. There are three presses in it: the first names a region in words, the second draws a wide circle round something you have missed, and the third rings that thing exactly.
6. When the strip is full, a button appears under the picture and the deduction card opens when you press it, never before: four statements, one of them true. Pick a wrong one and the scene tells you why it does not fit, and the card stays open. Pick the right one and the case closes with the write-up.

You cannot lose a crime scene

There is no fail state in here. No lives, no clock, no score and nothing that can be used up: the hints are free, they do not run out with the day, and nothing asks you to watch anything to get one. You can leave a case half searched, close the tab and come back to exactly the evidence you had. A closed case stays open to look at, with all five still ringed and the notebook still filled in, because the solved picture is the best screen this game has and locking it away would be silly.

The answer is never held hostage

Every case has its own page, and on that page the riddle comes first and the solution is one tap under it, in plain text, before the game starts. If you came here from a search because you wanted the answer to a riddle, you should have the answer in three seconds. The scene is what you get to do afterwards: it is the evidence the answer is built on, laid out where you can find it yourself.

Where the picture comes from

The plate is one painted scene and every object in it is a separate painting dropped onto it by a placer that is not allowed to be careless. It has to prove, before the scene can ship, that each findable thing owns a thumb-sized square of the picture that no other findable thing is drawn over, that no two of those squares touch, and that every object is the size it would really be at the distance it is standing. A field two paces wide draws a straw bale big and a leather glove small, and that is why the nine things that do not matter still look like they belong there. One scene is painted so far. The case above is dealt by the date, so everybody who opens this page today is searching the same field, and the pick will start moving as soon as the second one is painted.

The cases

• The Man in the Field. A rough meadow on a still morning, nine miles from the nearest airstrip. He has been carried out already, and the grass is wet and unmarked in every direction, which was the first thing the constable wrote down and the last thing he could explain.

More to solve

A crime scene is four or five minutes. When you want a longer one, the mystery games are five rooms, five suspects and a different puzzle behind every door. For more of the riddles these scenes are built from, the riddle collections hold hundreds with their answers and the reasoning under each. Or go and find eight differences between two paintings in spot the difference.