There’s a particular kind of detective game that doesn’t really want to entertain you. It wants to test you. No yellow paint on the walls, no helpful “Press Triangle to deduce,” no chatty sidekick filling the silence. Just a body, a room, and the uncomfortable suspicion that you’re going to miss something important. DETECTIVE Collection Vol. II sits firmly inside that lineage — for better and, occasionally, for worse.
Now available in a physical edition for PlayStation 5, this is the second compilation pulled together by Tesura Games in collaboration with publisher JanduSoft, gathering three of K148 Game Studio’s recent investigation titles — DETECTIVE: Scene Crime, DETECTIVE: Rainy Night, and DETECTIVE: The Test — into one boxed package. I went in with a blank notebook, a freshly sharpened pencil, and the kind of cautious optimism this genre demands. What I came out with was pages of scribbles, a couple of genuine “aha” moments, a few groans, and a full understanding of why this little series has become a quiet cult favorite among players who want their mystery games to bite back.
This is a sprawling review, so I’ve broken it into pieces. If you want the verdict first, scroll to the bottom. If you want me to walk you through every alleyway and rain-soaked motel along the way — pull up a chair.
What’s in the Box
Let’s get the housekeeping out of the way. DETECTIVE Collection Vol. II is a 3-in-1 physical compilation released on PS5 by Tesura Games, featuring three standalone titles developed by Spain’s K148 Game Studio: Scene Crime, Rainy Night, and The Test. It arrives PEGI 16-rated, supports a frankly impressive nine languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese), and is being sold as a single-disc package — the kind of object that actually feels like something on a shelf, which I’ll always argue for in an era allergic to physical releases.
The conceit linking the three games is consistent: you are an unnamed (or barely named) police detective. You arrive at a crime scene. The game does not explain itself. You walk around, you read documents, you check phones, you eavesdrop on conversations, you take real, paper-and-pencil notes, and then you answer a series of questions to close the case. There is no quest log nudging you forward. There is no investigative “deduction wheel” autocompleting your conclusions. There is, deliberately, no safety net.
That design philosophy — let the player do the work, even at the cost of friction — is the spine of the entire collection, and it’s the single most important thing to understand before deciding whether this disc belongs in your library. Below, I dig into each game on its own terms before stepping back to talk about the package as a whole.
DETECTIVE: Scene Crime — Five Crimes, One Detective, A Lot of Pages in the Notebook
Scene Crime is the most ambitious of the three in raw scope. It hands you five completely independent cases — The Hospital, The Underground, The Motorway, The Supermarket, and The Hotel — and lets you tackle them in any order. Each one drops you into a contained environment with a body, a series of objects to examine, witness statements buried in phones and tablets, and a PDA that asks you a handful of questions when you think you’ve got it figured out.
The premise behind each level is genuinely nasty in a way I appreciated. The Hospital flirts with the line between malpractice and murder. The Underground is a blood-soaked carriage that doesn’t explain itself. The Motorway is a multi-vehicle pile-up where the physics of the wreck doesn’t match the testimony. The Supermarket reads like a botched robbery until you notice the names on the security badges. And the Hotel — well, the Hotel is a wedding that ends with bodies, and untangling who shot whom takes more patience than anything else in the package.
What I liked: the cases are small, dense, and re-readable. They reward you for slowing down and noticing the wrong detail in someone’s statement — a date that doesn’t line up, a phone number that appears twice in unrelated contacts, a wedding photo where someone’s expression doesn’t match the toast they’re supposedly giving. When Scene Crime is working, it’s working in the right way. It’s the closest the collection gets to that “old-school whodunit” feeling where the murderer is named in the third act and you suddenly realize you had the answer two rooms ago.
What I didn’t love: the answer-submission system is more lenient than it should be. You’re given a multiple-choice list for each question, and the game doesn’t penalize wrong guesses, which means a determined cheater could speed-run cases by trial and error. The mouse-cursor interface — used for browsing the in-game phones and laptops — is also imprecise on a DualSense, and there’s no sensitivity slider. Some of the localized text has small spelling mistakes that occasionally muddy the very clue-reading the game is asking you to do. None of this kills the experience, but it does mean Scene Crime often feels like it’s holding itself back.
Verdict on this one: a solid, atmospheric short-story anthology with five distinct flavors of crime, propped up by a smart “no hand-holding” approach and held back by a few rough technical edges. Treat it as the appetizer. Bring the notebook.
DETECTIVE: Rainy Night — A Bottle Episode With Real Atmosphere
If Scene Crime is the anthology, Rainy Night is the prestige miniseries. This is the one I’d recommend to anyone who claims they “don’t usually like indie investigation games” because, frankly, this is the one with mood.
You play Iker Carmona, a police officer en route to investigate a string of disappearances when he pulls into a roadside lodging called the Holiday Motel for the night. By the next morning, the cars don’t start, the phones don’t work, the power is out, and a storm has effectively walled off the building from the outside world. There are seven other guests. Over five in-game days, divided into twelve narrative chapters, things get progressively, then aggressively, worse.
The atmosphere is the standout achievement here. The relentless rain and the muted, beige interior of the Holiday Motel do a tremendous amount of heavy lifting — there’s a real sense of being trapped, of every conversation taking place under fluorescent lights that have started to flicker. The cast of seven guests is sketched in efficient, archetypal strokes (the loner trucker, the nervous newlyweds, the older man who clearly knows more than he’s letting on, and so on), and the slow drip of revelations across the five days keeps you returning even when the gameplay loop thins.
And it does thin. Rainy Night is far more “narrative adventure with light deduction” than it is a hardcore mystery. Many of the chapter beats are essentially errands — knock on this door, hand out the food, brew a coffee — and the puzzles, when they appear, are sparse. The grand finale asks you to fill out a checklist of who-did-what-and-why, and that’s where the deduction promise is finally cashed in. Until then, you’re a guided tourist in someone else’s nightmare.
Whether that’s a problem depends entirely on what you want from the game. As pure horror-tinged storytelling — bottle-episode dread, escalating paranoia, symbolism creeping in around the edges — Rainy Night genuinely works. As a deduction puzzle, it’s the lightest of the three. The character models are stiff in a way that feels a generation older than the rest of the game, and there’s a whiff of low-budget jank in the animations, but I’ll be honest: the unease that comes from those slightly-off characters actually leans into the horror in a way I doubt the developers fully intended.
This was my favorite of the trio. Not because it’s the most game-like, but because it’s the most atmospheric — and atmosphere is the rarest currency in the genre.
DETECTIVE: The Test — Three Quick Cases, Three Different Headaches
The Test is the leanest entry on the disc, and I mean that both as compliment and warning. Three crime scenes — A Mysterious House, A Caravan Park, and A Café with Hidden Secrets — and a stripped-down promise: no hints, no tutorials, no narrative connective tissue between them. You arrive, you investigate, you submit answers, you move on.
The first case, set in a suburban home, is the most successful. There’s a satisfying density of objects to inspect — letters, drawers, calendars, a desk full of half-finished sketches — and the case rewards methodical room-by-room sweeping. I’d also offer a content note, because the press kit doesn’t: the first case touches on some genuinely dark subject matter involving the abuse of a minor, and it does so without warning, so go in with that awareness.
The second case, the Caravan Park, is where the design seams start to show. There’s a phone-unlock puzzle whose solution isn’t well clued inside this game; if you’ve played the earlier DETECTIVE: The Motel, you’ll have seen the pattern before, but if you haven’t, it’s the kind of puzzle that punishes you for being the wrong kind of stranger. I solved it eventually, but more by stubbornness than satisfaction.
The third case, the Café, takes the form of an undercover police operation that has gone south, and it’s a tighter, more focused scene than the second — closer in spirit to Scene Crime‘s short-story logic. The names of the involved parties (which the game asks you to identify) are presented as a list, and there’s a temptation to brute-force it. I’d urge you not to. The whole point of The Test is that you’ve earned the answer, even if the game itself doesn’t really care whether you have.
This is the most divisive of the three games. Played in the spirit it asks for — slowly, with the notebook, with no Googling — it’s a brisk, taut detective EP. Played impatiently, it’s frustrating, occasionally opaque, and over inside an evening. Your mileage will vary more here than anywhere else in the collection.
Gameplay
Step back from the individual games and a clear gameplay philosophy emerges across all three: observation and synthesis over interaction. You don’t combine evidence in an inventory. You don’t get a deduction board. You get a first-person camera, a “use” button, and your own ability to remember that the victim’s medical chart lists a penicillin allergy while one of the suspects is a pharmacist.
The PDA / notebook submission system is the through-line. Every case ends with a structured questionnaire — Who is the victim? Who is the perpetrator? What was the weapon? What was the motive? — and each answer is selected from a multiple-choice list. The strength of this design is that it’s universally accessible: no parser, no obscure menu, no fail state that locks you out. The weakness is that the absence of meaningful penalty for wrong answers means the system depends on the player’s good faith. Scene Crime is the worst offender here; Rainy Night and The Test hide their answers a little better, but the structural issue persists across the package.
Movement is functional rather than expressive. You walk, you sprint slightly, you crouch in a couple of contexts, and you interact. There are no minigames worth mentioning, no skill checks, no inventory management, and almost no failure states beyond “the game tells you you got the questions wrong.” Frame rate on PS5 is rock-steady — these are not graphically demanding games — and load times are negligible. Where I had real friction was with the cursor-driven mobile and PC interfaces inside the games, which never feel quite calibrated to a controller. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s the most consistent point of polish I’d want addressed in any future entry.
A small thing worth praising: the language support is excellent. Nine subtitle languages on a budget indie disc is not something you see every day, and for a Portuguese-speaking audience in particular, this is one of the few investigation packages of this size to ship with full PT subtitles in the box.
Story
Each game tells its own self-contained story, and tonally they’re remarkably different — which is, honestly, the strongest argument for buying the collection over any single entry. Scene Crime is procedural and pulpy; think a season’s worth of Law & Order episodes condensed into ninety minutes. Rainy Night is psychological horror with a slow burn; closer to The Mist by way of an Agatha Christie one-room mystery. The Test is cold and clinical, less interested in theme than in process.
The writing is uneven. At its best — the wedding-massacre case in Scene Crime, the symbolic creep of the Holiday Motel in Rainy Night — the prose has a real pulp-noir confidence and a willingness to engage with adult themes most budget mysteries dance around. At its worst, you bump into translation hiccups and the occasional misgendered pronoun that, in a genre where exact details are the gameplay, hurts more than it would in a game with better signposting.
What I’ll defend, even when the writing falters: the cases themselves are genuinely solvable. They have logic. The clues are real clues, not red herrings, and the answers don’t depend on outside-the-fiction knowledge. That’s a low bar, but a meaningful number of indie investigation games fail to clear it, and this collection — across all three games — does.
Soundtrack
There isn’t a soundtrack so much as a score of silences, and that’s deliberate. Scene Crime leans heavily on diegetic ambience: hospital monitors, the rumble of a subway tunnel, the hum of supermarket fluorescents. The Test is even more austere, often dropping music entirely once you enter a scene. Rainy Night is the loudest of the three, with the relentless rain doing the work that a more conventional horror score might have done — and frankly, doing it better. There are stretches in the motel where the only sound is water on a tin roof, and the absence of music ratchets the tension precisely because you keep waiting for the sting that never lands.
This minimalism won’t be for everyone. There’s no theme you’ll hum afterward, no boss battle stinger, no melodic flourish at the moment of revelation. What you get instead is sound design as world-building, and on that count the package punches well above its weight class. Headphones strongly recommended, particularly for Rainy Night.
Player Experience
This is the section where I’m going to be the most honest, because it’s where the collection most rewards or punishes specific kinds of players.
If you’re the kind of person who plays detective games with a notebook open and a pencil ready — and I cannot stress enough that the disc literally tells you to do this — you will get something out of this package. Probably not transcendent. Probably not a top-ten-of-the-year run. But you’ll get hours of genuine investigative thinking, three different tonal flavors of mystery, and a few cases that will stick with you longer than the running time would suggest.
If you’re a player who expects modern conveniences — quest markers, evidence-combining mechanics, dialog wheels, a deduction board, achievement-driven completion checklists — you are going to bounce off this collection hard. The presentation is austere. The animations are stiff. The interfaces are clunky. The cases are short, and you can blow through any one of them in an evening if you skim. None of these games is going to convert a skeptic.
If you’re a collector — and I include myself here — there’s something genuinely lovely about getting three indie deduction games on a single PS5 disc, in a real box, fully localized. Tesura Games has built a small but respectable line of these “preserve the indie” physical compilations, and as someone who lost half a digital library when storefronts shuttered, I’m always going to argue in favor of objects you can hold.
The collection is a roughly 6–10 hour total experience depending on how thoroughly you investigate, with Rainy Night the longest single piece and The Test the shortest. There are PlayStation trophies scattered across all three games, including a Platinum, and most of them are tied to natural progression rather than busywork.
Is it worth it?
DETECTIVE Collection Vol. II is not a flawless package, and I’m not going to pretend it is. The individual games show their indie-budget seams, the localization stumbles in places, the answer-submission system is too forgiving to land the punches it’s swinging, and the gameplay loop is, frankly, simpler than the marketing implies. Scene Crime is the most ambitious and the most uneven; The Test is the leanest and the most divisive; Rainy Night is the strongest and, in a fairer world, would be discussed alongside genre standouts for its atmosphere alone.
But — and this is a meaningful but — what K148 Game Studio is doing here is the right kind of unfashionable. In an era of investigation games that solve themselves, this is a trio of small, deliberately spartan whodunits that respect the player enough to let them fail. The fact that they’re now bundled into a physical PS5 edition by Tesura Games, fully localized into nine languages, with a handsome boxed presentation and a single-disc convenience, gives this collection a legitimate place in any mystery fan’s shelf rotation. It’s the kind of release I want more publishers to take a chance on.
If your idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon is a notebook, a coffee, and a body in a hotel room you can’t stop thinking about — DETECTIVE Collection Vol. II is exactly the disc you should be putting in your PS5.
If your idea of a detective game is L.A. Noire — adjust your expectations accordingly, and then enjoy it for what it actually is.
A rough-edged but genuinely thoughtful indie investigation triple-feature, lifted by Rainy Night‘s atmosphere and the simple, unfashionable pleasure of being trusted with your own deductions. Recommended for the patient, the analog-minded, and the physical-edition faithful.
