Crime & Punishment

I want to kill a man and then play detective hunting me down. That's exactly what Crime & Punishment offered you in the mid-eighties — a bizarre crime simulation and investigation game that puts you in the role of both murderer and cop at once. Definitely not an idea for everyone, but for the right people it was sheer genius.

The basic principle is simple. In the game world you commit a crime — murder, theft, fraud — and then you play the other side of the same game. You become the investigator who must solve your own crime. The game ran on MS-DOS, so graphics were Spartan, text-based and simple, but that didn't matter at all. What mattered was how the game thought — it was like reading Dostoevsky, but with the ability to play it yourself.

The mechanics were abstract. There's no arcade shooting or jumping here. Instead you click, read, gather information, decide what to do. When you're the murderer, you choose the crime scene, timing, disguise. When you're the detective, you follow leads, calculate probabilities, and if you noticed details in your first role, you have to remember them now. The game forces you to think. It's not about reflexes, but about logic and memory.

Crime & Punishment was a unique thing in the nineties — something between an educational game and a psychological thriller. Today you look at it more out of nostalgia than being drawn in. The graphics are dated, the pace slow, and without a manual it's hard to navigate the menus. But the core idea — that one game is played from two completely different perspectives — that's so clever that everyone who enjoys logic puzzles and classic literature should try it.

Today? Pure variety, when you've run out of all other games and fancy something almost nobody knows. You'll find it in online archives in an emulator and that half hour in it will be like reading an old detective story. Nothing more, but nothing less either.