Frequently Asked Questions

The Palladian Society is a detective game — one that runs entirely in your browser. You are given a real case: a crime scene to explore, suspects to study, evidence to examine. Your job is to investigate, form a theory, and name the culprit.

No controllers. No action sequences. No hand-holding. Just the evidence and your reasoning.

As a noir graphic novel. Each case plays out in comic chapters, and a casebook of evidence, documents and voice-acted interviews runs alongside it. You can switch between story and casebook at any time — and the final chapters stay sealed until you've solved the case.

No. Most of our investigators are not. Palladian is built for people who love mysteries, true crime, and detective fiction — not people with gaming backgrounds.

If you have ever finished a thriller and wished you could solve it yourself, that is exactly who this is for. The interface is a case file, not a controller.

A case follows four phases:

• I.Investigate — Walk through a 3D crime scene, examine evidence, watch suspect video monologues, receive timed forensic results.
• II.Organise — Review the observations the case has logged for you. Identify contradictions. Build your hypothesis.
• III.Decide — Select the evidence that supports your accusation, evaluated across five dimensions: Opportunity, Motive, Means, Alibi, and Credibility.
• IV.Conclude — Build the theory behind your accusation. Then name the culprit — and find out whether your theory survives the truth.

At the conclusion of each case, you commit to a culprit and the theory that explains the record. The case resolves from there: the truth is tested against the evidence you found, not against a hint meter.

If your accusation is right, the sealed story chapters open. The final shape of the case is earned only after you have named it.

Case #001. A 67-year-old literary translator dies in her locked study in rural Finland. The police call it heart failure. Her brother disagrees — because a manuscript found in the study mirrors the family's darkest secrets, and no one will say who wrote it.

Five suspects. Eight rooms. Over two hundred and fifty pieces of evidence. The flagship Palladian case, open now in the free beta.

Most investigators spend about three to five hours on Inheritance of Silence. There is no time limit.

Cases can be paused and returned to at any point. Some finish in one long sitting; others return over multiple sessions before submitting a final conclusion.

The current beta is built for solo investigation. You can still debate theories with someone beside you, but shared online rooms are not part of this beta release.

Multiplayer — same-room and remote — remains on the roadmap.

Not in the current beta. Printable case files are planned, but today the cases are played in the browser.

The open beta is the live public version of The Palladian Society. Four cases are playable now, free in the browser. You can start without an account — but members who join during the beta keep these four cases for good.

Start at app.palladiansociety.org.

It is open now. You can start at app.palladiansociety.org.

Open the beta site and choose a case. Nothing to download, nothing to pay.

You can begin without an account. Joining takes a moment, and it is what keeps these four cases yours after the beta — so it is worth doing before you start.

Any modern browser — nothing to download, no app store, no console. The investigation is built for a laptop or desktop screen: the casebook, the evidence board and the crime scene all want room to work in.

It runs on a phone or tablet, but a case is demanding on a small screen. A dedicated mobile reading mode is in development.

The open beta is free, and the four launch cases are complete — no partial content, no paywalled endings.

Members who join during the beta keep these four cases for good. Pricing for cases released after the beta has not been set.