Edicts of the Truthsinger: The Orb of Artemagus is a mystery game centering around a classic adventuring party that have returned from their latest quest only to discover the artifact they were sent to retrieve has vanished from their custody.
You play as Truthsinger Ak’ordia, a member of a specialized order of investigators who have a knack for getting to know their conversation partners and developing an internal sense of when they’re being lied to.
You must interview and interrogate the six party members, gathering their responses in your trusty casebook and then stacking those statements against each other to find the contradictions.
Each time you manage to catch a suspect in a lie, you get closer to understanding them a little deeper and being able to tell when they’re being less than truthful with you. Develop your rapport with each suspect to get hints when they’re telling you a bold-faced lie, a half-truth, and even, with enough familiarity, a lie of omission.
Just knowing someone’s lying to you isn’t enough, though! The tenets of your vocation require that you provide solid evidence that proves someone isn’t being truthful. Your gut instinct can guide you, but to make an edict on the truth of the matter, you’ll need to fill your casebook with conclusions wrestled from comparing and contrasting multiple claims.
Half the battle is knowing what to spend your time asking; while working to solve the case of the Orb of Artemagus, you have only seven days to get the evidence you need to make a final decision about who the thief is. Each question you ask costs you time, so solving this mystery isn’t as simple as asking every single question available to you.
Unless, of course, you choose to play on relaxed mode! It’s always an option to take your time and see every single piece of dialog in the game, if that’s your cup of tea.
The game rewards you for making connections and pursuing leads - you have to search out exactly what you want to ask characters about by going through the entries of your casebook. If it doesn’t occur to you to ask something, it won’t appear as an option!
In your role as Truthsinger, your investigative skills and social deduction instincts will be critical… because with this game, it’s entirely possible to get it wrong. At the end of the time limit, it will be up to you to present the evidence you think is relevant to accuse the person you think is guilty, and your persuasive power is more than capable of putting the wrong person behind bars.
