The Rainport Cases

The idea

Rainport, 1947, a city where it has rained every day since 1903. The Rainport Cases is a noir comedy told a chapter at a time: each chapter is a case for private eye Dash Malone, with the same town, the same people, and one new face and one new trick.

Chapter 1, Who Killed the Narrator? Every noir story has a voice telling you what the rain looks like and what the dame is hiding. In this one, someone has murdered that voice, and Dash has to work out who did it in a town where nobody is describing the world to him any more.

Chapter 2, The Day It Stopped Raining, starts the morning after. For the first time since 1903, Rainport wakes up to sunshine, and nobody knows what to do with it. Dash narrates himself now, and in daylight his hardboiled lines come out cheerful. Then the radio station's rain machine goes missing, the day before the Rain Jubilee.

Chapter 3, Dead Air, is eleven nights on. Dash has the job: he is the station's Narrator, and what he says on the air comes true, in character anyway. The night the Chief brings the dead Narrator's archive down to the lobby safe, the transmitter drops for thirty seconds. When it comes back the reels are gone, the Chief is on the floor, and so is the lobby: nobody described it while the lights were out, so it isn't there.

Trailer

What it is

• Three chapters so far, each a short point-and-click mystery for an evening: walk, look, pick things up, combine items and question suspects. Pick any of them from the title screen
• Chapter 1 has three acts and three narrators: first the snide original, then silence, then an impostor who flatters you while he lies
• Describe It Yourself: with the Narrator gone, every object is a "?", and picking the true description turns it into a clue
• A notebook where you connect clues into deductions, and a finale where you correct the impostor live on air, round by round, with proof
• Chapter 2 makes the weather the mechanic: a tin of dried peas makes it rain in any room, the sun shows what the gloom hid, and the rain gets people talking. It ends live on the radio at midnight, with three endings and one right one
• Chapter 3 makes the microphone the mechanic: pick a line to say about the town, and true ones take and cut away to show it, false ones get a faint "No I didn't" from whoever is in them, and in a room nobody has described, anything takes. Paint the lobby back from the witnesses' accounts, one prop at a time, then narrate the thirty seconds live against the sound man's version, with his hand on the switch
• Chibi characters in pre-rendered 3D dioramas, with warm lamplight, venetian-blind shadows, a tilt-shift toy look and a dark brown and amber palette
• Every line voiced, with music, sound effects, hints that say more the second time, save slots, rebindable keys and controller support
• Comfort settings: reduce motion, sound captions, lines that wait for a click, and a text size that scales the menus too

Built with

• Godot 4.7 and GDScript, exported for Linux, Windows, Android and the web
• Written and built with Claude Code
• Art generated locally with Z-Image Turbo through SwarmUI, then edited, cut out and placed by hand
• Voices with Kokoro, and sound effects and music with Stable Audio Open, all running locally

Status

Out now on itch.io, name your own price. Play it in the browser, or download it for Linux, Windows or Android. Version 2.1 adds Chapter 3, Dead Air, with its own voices and sounds; saves from the first two chapters carry over. Version 2.0 renamed the game from Who Killed the Narrator? to The Rainport Cases, made the cases chapters, and added the comfort settings; the browser version fetches a chapter's voices only when you pick it, so it starts in a third of the time.

Two more chapters are designed and have build plans: Everybody Mimes and Quarter to Midnight. They'll come one at a time. The game's toy look and art pipeline also carry over to a new game, Galleria Tycoon.