Latent: Crime Lab Mystery

Night shift at an understaffed city crime lab. Detectives drop evidence on your bench and want a name by morning. Your old teacher's most famous fingerprint match is about to be looked at again, and it doesn't hold up.

Latent is a forensic lab game. Every case brings two or three exhibits, each with its own test. Do the science, write the report, then defend it on the witness stand, where overstating your results costs you as much as getting them wrong.

The tests

• Latent prints: pair the minutiae on a lifted print with a suspect's card. Seven pairs identify. Too few points? Call it inconclusive
• DNA gels: run the gel and find the lane whose every band is in the evidence, even in mixed samples
• Ballistics: drag a test-fire under the comparison microscope until the striations run straight across
• Toxicology: three reagents, three colours, one poison on the chart
• Fibres: colour, thickness, twist and cross-section against each suspect's clothes
• Blood spatter: string the stains back to where the blow was struck

What's inside

• 40 cases in five seasons, and a story about a lab director who closed cases with bad science
• Every exhibit is a detailed 3D-rendered object
• Generated prints, gels, bullets, poisons and fibres: no two cases are the same
• The witness stand: answer the defence honestly
• A daily backlog, new every day
• Furnish your lab
• English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Plays offline, no account

Controls (PC)

• Mouse: everything: exhibits, print points, the gel, dragging the test-fire, reagents, garments, stains, the report and the stand.
• Enter: takes a story card's button, starts and resumes.
• Esc: pause / back. On the title it asks before quitting.

The itch.io version

• No ads. No in-app purchases. The full game, once.
• Expert Consult (90-second cooldown), Rush processing (45-second cooldown) and one second chance per case are free.
• Double pay is gone, so coins stay at their earned rate.
• A 540x960 portrait window that can be resized.

Linux requires libcurl.so.4 in addition to a working graphics driver.

All characters and events are fictional; the science is simplified for play.

Credits

3D models and studio light: Poly Haven (CC0). Icons: Microsoft Fluent Emoji (MIT). Music: "Lightless Dawn" and "Ossuary 6 - Air" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0. Fonts: Oswald, Nunito (SIL OFL 1.1). Made with Godot (MIT). Crash reports by Sentry (MIT).