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Set the Record Straight
A 1998-set deduction game. Trawl a period internet for documents, photographs, and dead ends, then correct the official record, from who really wrote a song to whether a murder verdict should stand. An anthology of records set straight, one careful search at a time.

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Features
Single-player
Family Sharing
Profile Features Limited 
Languages:
Interface Full Audio Subtitles
English ✔

Coming Soon To Early Access

The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players.

Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Set the Record Straight is an anthology, and an anthology is never quite finished: there's always another buried credit to set straight. Early Access lets me put a substantial, polished set of cases in your hands now and keep adding new ones with your help, instead of holding the whole collection back until the last one is done. What players tell me (which searches feel fair, which deductions land, where a case wants one more clue) shapes the cases still to come.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Around 6 to 12 months: long enough to add the remaining planned cases and work in player feedback, while holding every new case to the standard of the ones already here. It leaves Early Access when the anthology feels complete, not on a fixed clock.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“I plan to keep growing the anthology through Early Access: more cases across new eras and creative fields (film, comics, music, theatre, architecture, and beyond), alongside refinements to existing cases based on player feedback. The core loop of trawling a 1998 web, reading the sources, and correcting the record is already in place, and I don't plan to change it. Early Access here is about adding to the collection, not rebuilding the game, so 1.0 should be a larger anthology built on the same foundation you're playing today.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Fully playable and complete in its mechanics. The Early Access release includes an anthology of self-contained cases, a larger set than the free demo, with a guided tutorial, a hand-built period web to search, photographs to identify, and the full credit-correction system. No placeholder content and no stubbed features: it's a finished experience I plan to keep growing, not a prototype.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“Yes. The Early Access price is the lowest Set the Record Straight will be, and I plan to raise it when the game leaves Early Access. Buying during Early Access gets you every case added along the way at no additional cost.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Directly. As a solo developer I read everything. The Steam forums and your reviews are where I'll take case ideas, difficulty notes, and reports of any search or clue that doesn't feel fair, and fold them into both new cases and fixes to the existing ones. In effect, players help playtest the anthology as it grows.”
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About This Game

It's 1998, and the record is wrong.

The official record lies: a front, a pen name, a studio figurehead, a borrowed name, and a murder verdict a county weekly has treated as settled since 1983. You're the researcher who sets it straight.

Armed with a period search engine and a desk full of webpages, Usenet posts, zines, liner notes, letters, court papers, and clippings, you work an anthology of self-contained cases. Read first. Then correct the record, one proven entry at a time.

No twitch. No fail state. Just documents, photographs, and deduction.

Each case asks in its own way

The early cases hand you a master credit sheet in three parts: who was credited, what really happened, and who really did the work.

The fourth case is longer, and different. A county weekly is preparing five pages on a fifteen-year-old murder conviction, and every line must stand on a document. You file the lines. The paper sets them.

How it plays

  • Trawl a hand-built 1998 web: webpages, Usenet, zines, clippings, liner notes, and court records, all cross-referenced.
  • No guessing your way through: corrections confirm only in batches, and a failed check never says which entry fell short.
  • Name the faces: track down the photographs, then work out who is who.
  • Documents by post: in the fourth case, the offices release their files to the paper as your sheet fills.
  • An anthology: self-contained cases, each in its own era and field, with more planned through Early Access.

Set the Record Straight is a work of fiction. All characters, places, bands, songs, films, comics, stage works, studios, companies, publications, and court cases in this game are invented for its puzzles. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, to real works, or to real organizations is coincidental and not intended as a statement of fact.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The game's period artwork was created with OpenAI's image generation: character portraits, the document plates and photographs on the desk, the paper stocks and document chrome the pages are printed on, and the background textures behind the game. Every one of them was directed, reviewed and composited by hand. Some diagrams were authored as SVG with OpenAI Codex. The store page art is composited from the same artwork. These assets were reviewed before release for originality and likeness. The game's written content, meaning the documents the player searches and reads and the text of the interface, is authored by the developer. Where a passage began as a draft produced with a large language model, it was cut, rewritten and checked by hand before it entered the game. No text is generated while the game runs. Sound effects and the ambient bed are produced by a deterministic synthesis program (oscillators, filtered noise and math-based DSP), not by a generative-AI audio model and from no sampled or library audio. Fonts, engine and runtime are non-AI third-party components under their own licenses (see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt).

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

One case concerns a missing child and a murder conviction, told through court papers, letters and newspaper pages. No violence is shown.

System Requirements

Windows
macOS
    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
    • Processor: Any 64-bit dual-core
    • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Integrated graphics
    • Storage: 1 GB available space
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    Minimum:
    • OS: macOS 12 (Monterey) or later
    • Processor: Apple Silicon or Intel
    • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Integrated graphics
    • Storage: 1 GB available space
    Recommended:
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