Mirecut

Everybody in this town is lying. One of them about the murder.

Play Mirecut — free, in your browser

Mirecut is a first-person detective game set over one night in a logging town in the Pacific Northwest, rendered in the visual language of a 1997 console — low-poly geometry, 64-pixel textures, vertex-snapped polygons and fog you steer by. A timber scaler called Royce Hallam has been found three nights dead in the cab of his own truck, four hundred metres up a logging spur he had no reason to be on, and the substation’s theory does not survive contact with his boots. You have a county sedan, a notebook and a town of six hundred people. Drive the Cut Road, learn where things are, and work it out: the bar that shut two hours early, the motel register nobody writes in, the cabin at the top of the spur where a man watched the whole thing happen, and a photograph on a wall with one too many cant hooks in it. Seven suspects, and every one of them is lying about something — six of them about something that is not this murder. The case is solved by reading what you find rather than by following an arrow, and the ending asks you to prove it: who, why, how, where, and three pieces of evidence that carry it.

Controls

How to Play Mirecut

Start at the substation. Chief Dunn will tell you what the county knows, which is less than it sounds, and the desk by the window is yours. Ask her for the telephone records while you are there.

Everything is found by looking, not by following a marker. There are no glowing outlines in this game: if a thing matters it is because it looks wrong, and the prompt only appears once you are standing in front of it. Search the evidence store, then go and stand at the spur where they found him.

The notebook is the whole case in one place — TAB, any time. Statements go on the record when somebody makes them, and when you find the paper that disproves one it is struck through with what disproves it. That page is the game.

Talking has four moves. ASK puts the question. PRESS leans on an answer you do not believe, and needs something in your notebook behind it. CONFRONT puts one specific piece of evidence on the table and is the only move that breaks a lie. EASE OFF backs away, and with three of these people it is the only thing that works.

Confronting with the wrong thing is the expensive move: they find out what you have and they relax. Read the notebook before you open your mouth.

Pushing too hard ends the conversation for tonight and nothing else. Drive somewhere, come back, and everything you already broke is still broken. You cannot lock yourself out of a witness.

When you are ready, make the accusation to Dunn at the substation. She wants four answers and three pieces of evidence, and she will tell you specifically what does not fit. Being wrong costs you points and nothing else.

Mirecut Strategy Guide

  1. Learn the town before you learn the case. One crossroads, one loop and about ten minutes of driving is all it takes — after that you stop reading signs and start knowing where things are, which is the whole point of there being no map.
  2. Six of the seven alibis break. Only one of those breaks is about the murder, and the game is built so that the most convincing one is not it. When a broken alibi points somewhere, ask what it actually proves rather than what it suggests.
  3. Physical evidence can be completely genuine and mean nothing at all. There is blood in somebody’s truck in this town and it got there in front of witnesses, with a book to prove it.
  4. Read the coroner’s supplement properly. It describes a shape, and there are two things in Mirecut that could make that shape — the accusation screen offers you both, and only one of them has a second contact ninety millimetres behind the point.
  5. Anything the case really needs can be reached more than one way. If a door will not open yet, it is not the only door.
  6. The motive is the last thing to arrive and the hardest to reach, and it is two years older than the murder. When somebody’s name turns up on a plaque, go and find out what happened.
  7. Take the whole town before you accuse. Every item in the file is worth points and the deductions the notebook draws from them are worth more, while a withdrawn accusation costs seven hundred — about four documents.

Questions & Answers

Is Mirecut free, and does it need a download?

It is free and it runs in the browser tab you already have open. There is no installer, no account and no launcher. The whole town is generated in code — the game loads no image file, no audio file and no font — so it starts almost immediately even on a phone.

How long does the case take?

About sixty to ninety minutes for a first play, and rather less once you know the town. It saves continuously, so you can stop anywhere and the file is exactly where you left it; closing the tab loses nothing.

Can the murder actually be solved, or does the game just tell you at the end?

It can be solved. Every conclusion the ending asks for is supported by something you can find and read, there is more than one route to anything the solution depends on, and the accusation screen will not accept the right answer with the wrong evidence behind it. A headless test plays the whole case from a fresh start every time the project is built, for exactly this reason.

What happens if I accuse the wrong person?

Chief Dunn tells you specifically what does not fit — about that person, that motive or that weapon — and you go back out with everything you had. There is no fail state and nothing is lost. A withdrawn accusation costs you points at the end and nothing else.

Can I get stuck, or miss something and be unable to finish?

No. Evidence is never removed, a place never leaves the map, and a broken alibi never un-breaks. Pushing a suspect too hard ends that conversation for the night and nothing more — drive somewhere, come back, and everything you already got out of them is still on the record.

Does it play on a phone?

Yes, held sideways. Driving puts a steering pad under your left thumb that works from wherever you touch it, with the throttle and brake under your right. On foot the left stick appears where you put your thumb down and the right half of the screen is a look pad. Every control is at least 44 pixels and the text size is a setting.

Why does it look like a PlayStation game?

Because it is built that way rather than filtered that way. The geometry is genuinely low-polygon, the textures are genuinely 64 pixels, the lighting is baked into vertex colours the way hardware of the era required, and the polygons snap to the pixel grid in the vertex shader. The fog is not an effect on top — it is how far you can see, and steering by your own headlights is the game.

Is there any violence on screen?

No. There is a murder and the game is about its aftermath, but the body has been removed before you arrive and nothing violent happens in front of you. What it has instead is a dark, foggy town at night and a fair amount of reading.

If you like Mirecut

Also in: Free 3D Browser Games (WebGL, No Download), Free PS1-Style Browser Games (PSX Aesthetic, Vertex Snap, Low-Poly Horror) · All collections


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