Daily Sleuth

Daily Sleuth takes place entirely in Caldmere, Maine: a fictional town presented as a real setting, with its 25 locations, its 65 inhabitants and a displayed population of 4,218 souls. Each morning a case is drawn, numbered and titled, and set in one of the town's locations, a hardware store for instance. Three suspects are put forward, "Three with motive. Three with access.", each with their occupation and address in town. You open their files, you read, and in one go you name the who, the where and the why.

1. Read the morning file. The site states the rule bluntly: the narrative is the entirety of the evidence.
2. Open the suspects' files: biography, role, relations, previous cases. The site warns that the town is small and that three people are the guilty ones.
3. If you get stuck, ask for a hint. Up to four are available, and they don't cost any accusations, but the site notes that the best ranks go to those who finish blind.
4. Accuse: the who, the where and the why in a single shot. Five accusations in total; each mistake reveals one more hint and sends you back to the files.
5. Share the verdict without spoiling: the game offers a poster, a file or a ticket to choose from, and the case remains sealed for others.

Because the town is the real character. Caldmere exists beyond the case of the day, with its twenty-five locations, its sixty-five inhabitants, its counter of already solved cases and its dedicated navigation entry, so a suspect is not a grid entry but someone whose previous cases you have read. Add a scoring system that punishes lazy curiosity by counting hints double, a week that rises from a calm Monday to an impossible Saturday, and a sharing feature designed to spoil nothing: it's a crime series disguised as a daily game.

The feedback is not flashy, it is accounting-based, and the formula is displayed: score = (hints used × 2) + accusations spent, the lower the better. At 1 or less you come out Super Sleuth with five stars; above 8 you remain Beat Cop with one, passing through Chief Inspector, Detective and Junior Detective. A failed accusation is therefore never neutral: it increases the score by one point and gives you one more hint, which pushes the slider both ways at once. It's a game where you can solve the case and still solve it badly.

Case of the Day

Numbered, dated and labeled with a level from the weekly scale, ROUTINE for instance.

Weekly difficulty scale

Five steps named, from OPEN & SHUT on Monday to COLD CASE on Saturday, via ROUTINE, COMPLEX and CLASSIFIED, the latter being advertised as the step where the narrative actively tries to mislead you.

Leaderboards

Daily, weekly and monthly, ranked by stars, hints used and accusations spent. You need a display name, therefore a free account, to appear; anonymous scores remain off the register.

Caldmere

A navigation entry devoted to the town itself, with its 25 locations, its 65 characters and a counter of resolved cases.

• The scoring counts hints double and accusations single. A cautious accusation therefore costs half as much as a comfort hint: when you hesitate between the two, the bad idea is almost always the hint.
• Only three suspects are put forward, out of sixty-five inhabitants. It is the narrative that restricts the field, not the town: rereading the file yields more than going to explore Caldmere.
• The order of the days is not neutral. Monday is presented as a warm-up and Saturday as the worst of the week: you test a method at the start of the week, not on a Saturday.
• If you played without an account, create one from the same browser: the site says your already solved cases follow you upon registration.