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Legal Dungeon is a game about police paperwork and corruption. It was created by Korean developer Somi and released in May of 2019. We will be playing as Lieutenant Jane Blue, the newly appointed leader of the Central Police Station's second criminal division. Our new job entails reviewing the paperwork submitted by our underlings about their investigations, then submitting the report along with a suggested verdict to the prosecutor. When we recommend indictment, our division is rewarded with points that determine every officer's salary, chances for promotion, and other benefits. The more serious the crime, the more points the case is worth. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Papers, Please for the most part, with a weird pseudo-rpg battle system thrown in at the end of each chapter.
I like Legal Dungeon because it plays with some interesting ideas and shows how systems that sound good on paper can be in fact incredibly poorly designed in real life. In theory, the points system in the game encourages the police to be vigilant and pursue suspects to the best of their ability. In practice, the system results in the police being incentivized to convict, inflate the severity of the charges as much as possible, and punishes divisions that are in charge of areas with low crime rates. Almost every character in this game is corrupt, but most of them aren't taking bribes, exchanging favors, or breaking the law: they're simply trying to avoid a pay cut.
The game has 8 cases and 14 endings, all of which I plan to show if there's enough interest in the thread. Each case has the obvious indictment/non-indictment outcome, but some have special outcomes that can be found with outside-the-box thinking and interpretation of the documents. For each case I'll present the documents and then leave the verdict to a thread vote. The "dungeon" segments, where the outcome of each case is decided, are essentially being prompted to present relevant information from the files in order to attack or defend the accused criminal. Getting a consensus on what exact evidence to present for each "question" would be tedious, but readers are encouraged to justify their verdict with information from the file. Once I feel like a consensus has been reached, I'll post the outcome of the case, which should be a shorter update.
I plan to update this thread at least every weekend-- I may be able to squeak out the post-case updates during a weekday, but no promises. This game isn't exactly popular, so I doubt this will be an issue, but no spoilers, please.
Let's get dungeoning.