The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is a big budget Japanese FMV game originally for consoles which I played in Windows 11 running under Parallels on an Apple M1 Macbook. It didn't run perfectly that way, the game is a little demanding performance wise.

The plot of A Shijima Story concerns the Shijima family who have an old-fashioned estate close to Mount Fuji. A skeleton has been discovered buried beneath a cherry tree, your character Haruka Kagami is a crime author who gets invited to the estate to solve the mystery. Her friend Eiji acts as a technical advisor for her books, and he is a son of the Shijima family.

The Shijima family have been cursed by a long sequence of mysterious murders. These murders seem related to the family's secret research into stopping aging, and a fabled Tokijiku fruit which is said to grant immortality. The game is set in three time periods: nowadays, fifty years ago, and a hundred years ago. Gameplay cycles between those three periods, and you have to solve different cases in each period.

Investigation starts with watching long sequences of video clips. During these video clips there are clues you can find (the game will automatically regard you as having found them afterwards but you can rewatch the video clips as much as you like).

Having watched a series of video clips you then play a matching game with shapes to derive hypotheses from those clues you could have spotted. When you've got enough hypotheses the game lets you proceed to an Agatha Christie style denouement where you denounce the guilty party in each case. If you denounce the wrong person you get to try again but this does take some time to get back to where you were.

Useful comment: the game will let you proceed to the denouement when you haven't got enough hypotheses to identify the perpetrator. So I recommend matching everything in sight before you proceed, each time you get a new hypothesis you get another short B/W video clip to watch so you're missing out if you try to speed run.

The game provides plenty of screens of information on how your investigation is going, room layouts and character sketches etc. The game autosaves but you can manually save as well, I didn't find out how to load games at first. The game is largely keyboard controlled, it was only during the matching clues part I used a mouse.

The same actors play the roles in all three time periods which perhaps fits the idea of there being ageless people around. The acting is professionally done and restrained. The settings and costumes (including colourful kimonos) are up to feature film standards.

The story is well-written and involving, there are a few plot holes but in real life there are plot holes. Japan has its own tradition of detective fiction, there was a writer and critic Edogawa Ranpo who was very important in the history of Japanese crime stories. He is mentioned in the game. The game's story could have been written by more modern Japanese crime authors like Higashino Keigo whose books have been much adapted for films and TV series.

There are subtitles but the dialogue is dubbed in English, I wished there was an option to hear the spoken dialogue in Japanese.

Opening screen

A lot of video clips to be watched

Time to mull over those video clips

Match those clues up

Matched clues lead to hypotheses

Time to name the guilty party

There is plenty of help and options