The Industrial Area is the first district investigated in Criminal Case: Grimsborough.
A worker-oriented district full of crime and poverty, the Industrial Area mainly serves as an introduction for the main mechanics of the game as well as its characters, with short cases and a relatively simple storyline involving a Mob War while you start accustoming yourself to your colorful companions in the Grimsborough Police Department and the gruesome murders that await you for the rest of the game.
Cases Set in the Industrial Area
- The Death of Rosa Wolf: A young woman is found with her throat slashed by the road.
- Corpse in a Garden: A mortgage broker has his hand cut off and left to bleed in a bathtub.
- The Grim Butcher: A teenager is gutted and hanged like a pig carcass in a butchery.
- The Dockyard Killer: A junkie is found stabbed by the docks.
- A Russian Case: A Russian mafia boss is beaten to death inside his own restaurant.
- Good Cop Dead Cop: A member of the police force is shot inside a subway station.
- Death by Crucifixion: A construction company director is crucified inside a construction site.
- Beautiful No More: A striptease dancer is beaten to death with a hammer in an alley.
- Burned to the Bone: A gang member is burned to death in a parking lot.
- Under the Knife: A plastic surgeon is stabbed to death in an alley.
- Into the Vipers' Nest: A gang leader is bludgeoned to death with a bottle inside his own lair.
Tropes:
- Animal Motifs: Guess what the Vipers' motif is.
- Arc Villain: A Big Bad Ensemble between Tony Marconi, boss of the Italian mafia, Troy Cassidy, leader of The Skulls gang, and Salvador Cordero, leader of The Vipers gang, with each one causing havoc in their own way, including against each other.
- Drugs Are Bad: A recurring theme across the district is that drugs will absolutely wreck you and make your life miserable, as we learn with many of the suspects whose lives have been ruined by them.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The Industrial Area is the only district in Grimsborough whose number of cases isn't a multiple of five, since the tutorial actually counts as a case unlike every following entry in the franchise.
- Cases in this district tend to be extremely short and rushed, with two of them only having one/two chapters instead of the usual three and not every Killer's Profile having the usual five elements.
- Gang of Hats: The Vipers and the Skulls. The former gang's members all wear blue and have tattoos of a snake somewhere on their person; the latter gang's members all wear red and carry tattoos of a flaming skull.
- Mob War: The main focus of the district is stopping a three-way war between The Vipers, The Skulls, and the Italian Mafia and, if possible, arresting Tony Marconi for his crimes.
- Recurring Character: The main recurring characters for this district are Tony Marconi, One-Tooth Sam, Ginger, Troy Cassidy, Salvador Cordero, Ash Bison, and to a lesser extent Bart Williams.
- Tattooed Crook: All members of the local Vipers and Skulls gangs have a tattoo of, respectively, a curled-up snake and a flaming skull somewhere on their bodies.
- Urban Hellscape: As we learn throughout the district, the Industrial Area isn't the prettiest or safest place to live in Grimsborough. Gangs and mafias are extremely abundant, poverty and crime are through the roof, drugs are everywhere, and most people you meet are either violent, Jerkasses, or just plain apathetic towards everything, including death.
