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Crimes wait for no man!
Crime O'Clock is a Mystery Fiction Hidden Object Game by Bad Seed, released on July 21, 2023. As a member of the Time Police, the player is tasked with investigating images depicting five different eras: the Information Age, the Lost Age, the Atlantean Age, the Steam Age, and the Aeon Age. Each Age consists of ten "ticks", allowing you to see how events play out across an entire day and track the routes of suspects and evidence in order to solve anomalous crimes and keep the timeline intact.

Tropes:

  • 20 Minutes into the Future: The Aeon Age occurs in 2099 A.D., a scant 84 years from the Information Age when most of the other Ages are thousands of years apart, yet shows that society has completely changed into being Cyberpunk thanks to the reintroduction of ancient and powerful technology.
  • 20 Minutes into the Past: The Information Age is specifically Milan, Italy (the developers' hometown) in 2015 A.D.
  • Advanced Ancient Humans: The Lost Age showcases a civilization that's aesthetically based on ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also has technology comparable to modern day and a series of "earthgates" used for quick commutes.
  • Advert-Overloaded Future: The player's EVE, the futuristic Virtual Sidekick vital to keeping the timeline from collapsing, is a "freemium subscription" version that's in disbelief that you'd rather wait the seconds it takes to install new subroutines than to watch a targeted advertisement.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The various criminal masterminds causing crimes in the past with the goal of changing the future mostly turn out to be EVE-like artificial intelligences that don't want EVE to assimilate them. It emerges that the AI they form when complete, ORACLE, was supposed to safeguard the timeline but could only focus on how humans always seemed to be their own worst enemies, leading it to conclude that the only way to save time was to erase it entirely.
  • Anachronic Order:
    • As a time traveler, Walter Heisenberg's Fulcrum Story in the Atlantean Age jumps around from tick to tick rather than progressing from tick one through to tick ten like everybody else.
    • The Fulcrum Story for "MAIN CHARACTER" in the Aeon Age is backwards, getting an assignment in Tick 10 and escaping with the loot in Tick 1.note 
  • The Bet: One case in the Lost Age features two merchants, Shoshan and Ufa, playing a game called "Kahp'tl'sm" in which the goal is to make the most profit (which of course evolved over time into modern capitalism). It then turns out that the loser had to permanently forfeit their marketplace stall to the winner, which, combined with a little prodding from "RAGE", led to an anomalous crime taking place.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate: The five antagonists, who each make their mark on the timeline in different ways.
    • OBLIVION is a shapeshifter who can take the form of multiple beings to trick other characters.
    • RAGE encourages characters to act out of irrational anger.
    • AVATAR crushes victims with heavy objects and scatters the event through spacetime.
    • CHIMERA moves and replaces objects into characters' paths to influence them to act in certain ways.
    • LEGACY is capable of removing people and even their motivations from the timeline entirely.
  • Book Ends:
    • The first true case you tackle (and the first involving a rogue AI) involves a band's singer and frontman getting crushed by a falling object, as does the last case before EVE assimilates the last AI. Thankfully, the latter case isn't fatal—the crime that needs to be prevented instead is the theft of Johnny Silvercat's cybernetic arm.
    • The first tutorial case is about a man breaking into a rooftop apartment to commit a robbery, with a key hanging over the door. The final mission before the endgame, catching and assimilating LEGACY, ends with examining that key.
  • Butterfly of Doom: The antagonists' goal is to disrupt the true timeline by introducing small changes that snowball into bigger ones, usually resulting in a vital person's death.
  • Butt-Monkey:
    • William Gloom, a character in the Steam Age, is murdered in multiple cases; he's even murdered multiple times in the same case, as Walter Heisenberg tries to abuse time travel to keep him dead before he uncovers powerful Atlantean relics.
    • Aqua from "The Brown Clay Pot" also ends up dead twice, first from falling to her death, and then later on she's crushed by a statue's head along with her partner.
    • Roberto Beniamino is a non-victim recipient of this after the second case; after being reamed out for vandalizing public property, he attends Axl Blood's concert, where he accidentally throws his drink over another concertgoer, gets into a fight, and subsequently gets kicked out.
    • Jasper, an influencer who has a Fulcrum Story, gets kicked out of the same concert venue at an earlier point in time. Undeterred, he sneaks in anyway, gets chased out again, and eventually gets blasted with water by an elephant at the zoo.
  • Cain and Abel: "The Amethyst Gate" has a pair of sisters named, fittingly, Kain and Havel, with Kain deciding to Murder the Hypotenuse to court Havel's husband.
  • Charm Person: The case "The Brown Clay Pot" involves a man being granted an amulet by "Chimera" that has some power of the Mind Stone and makes him irresistible to women, including the victim, who is too distraught after reading a letter from her heartbroken boyfriend to notice she's about to walk off of a building.
  • Cheaters Never Prosper: "The Coral Trophy" involves a sports team coach dosing his team with performance boosters so they can win a match. He comes out of it badly either way - either his star player murders him when the player catches him dumping the evidence, or he's arrested for the crime of Pride.
  • Classified Information: The player Detective will often come across characters and events whose full importance to the True Timeline requires "Crimson"-level security clearance to declassify, though it will be divulged to them if it's pertinent to a case they're currently investigating.
  • Close-Enough Timeline: The Time Police are unable to completely prevent crimes, but as long as neither the victims nor the culprits are removed from the timeline, history isn't in danger of completely collapsing.
  • Colourful Theme Naming: Every case title is constructed out of a color (which is then the color used for the non-black-and-white elements in the UI for that case) and something connected with the case itself. As examples, the first two cases are "The Apartment in Pink" and "The Enigmatic Lime Drink".
  • Creator Cameo: The Bad Seed office can be seen in the Information Age, and by the time of the tenth tick they're having a launch party for the game.
  • Crystal Spires and Togas: The Atlantean Age, which is known for "its magic crystals and its peaceful and utopian civilization". It's so utopian, in fact, that the Time Police have to manipulate time themselves and introduce the concepts of punishment and the Seven Deadly Sins in order to prevent more catastrophic timeline changes such as murder caused by anomalies.
  • Cyberpunk: The Aeon Age, which is stated to be a world of "bright lights, ruthless corporations and underground struggles".
  • Dating Catwoman: "The Blue Electric Sheep" ends with Deckard, the detective, starting a relationship with Nina, the wanted thief who would have killed him without the Time Police intervening.
  • Death from Above: AVATAR's modus operandi is to cause something big to fall on a victim and crush them, scatter the event across the timeline, and lock the individual fragments behind various sigils that appear one at a time before the event.
  • Defiant to the End: Most of the AI react like this during their boss battles, with the sole exception of Chimera, who begs for you to stop before realizing that EVE isn't actually giving you any choice in the matter.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game is done with uncolored lineart, save for marking objects that an activated power can be used on.
  • Early-Bird Cameo:
    • Most of the future cases' events can be seen while dealing with past ones.
    • Walter Heisenberg shows up as a Fulcrum Story in the Atlantean Age before becoming directly involved in main cases in the Steam Age.
  • Engineered Public Confession: Of a sort in "The Iris Poisonous". In order to prevent the pharaoh's food taster from being murdered by the pharaoh for fraternizing with his wife, the Detective and EVE redirect his Earthgate wormhole so he steps out of the palace gate instead, the one that you can only use if you have royal blood (which the food taster has, being the pharaoh's brother-in-law). This is right out in the open in front of several witnesses.
  • Evil Luddite: The Steam Age has numerous cases involving "New Dawn", an organization originally composed of laborers that toiled for wealthy industrialists and came to the conclusion that their lives would be a lot better without any industry at all.
  • Evil Twin: The case "The Golden Heart" involves Bartholomew Gifford, the assistant to a roboticist creating an iron giant, and Nathan Gifford, his twin brother that's part of the Evil Luddite "New Dawn" faction and wants to sabotage the machine.
  • Fun with Acronyms:
    • The six AI of the story, Oblivion, Rage, Avatar, Chimera, Legacy and Eve are all components of the super-AI ORACLE.
    • The mysterious informant is only known as "GM". In the final beat of the story, after being convinced to spare the timeline and seal the ORACLE Protocol away, EVE thinks up a few things the letters could stand for: Game Master, for setting the player and EVE up as partners; Gray Matter, for guiding the former to stop the latter with a lengthy plan; and Guardian Memory, for sacrificing himself for the sake of preserving the timeline.
  • Funny Background Event: Given that this is a Hidden Object Game, there are many things happening in every tick of every age, not all of which are drawn attention to, such as the woman in the Information Age who grows a Piranha Plant and is then eaten by it.
  • Good Is Not Nice: This is one of the things that EVE has you understand early on, that it may not necessarily be the culprit's fault that they're doing what they are, but maintaining the true timeline by having them arrested is your number one priority.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: While the Big Bad Duumvirate is the direct cause of your problems, the Mysterious Informant informs the player that the Aeon Age versions of Crimson Vow and Eye of Ra, not wanting "humanity to collapse into a black whirlpool of degradation", used the Sacred Stones of Atlantis to create the Artificial Intelligences and form the ORACLE protocol.
  • Heroic Mime: Of the Silent Bob variant. It can be inferred that the player Detective is actually quite talkative, but all we see are EVE's responses.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Just as the timeline is about to be erased by the ORACLE protocol, your future self offers themself up as the final key to breach the AI's defenses and reach out to EVE to show her the good in humanity. This sheer willingness to give up their life for the greater good—along with all the prior evidence of good deeds and virtues being exercised by humanity—is what finally convinces her to stop the timeline's obliteration and restore the erased Ages.
  • High-Class Glass: Members of the Volpin family, a lineage of classy thieves that are repeatedly involved in the cases investigated throughout history, can all be identified by the monocles they wear.
  • Hint System: Clicking on EVE during a case will show your current objective and up to three covered hints. If a minute passes by without progress, a lightbulb icon will appear next to EVE, and one of the hints can be uncovered. Usually, the first hint will indicate what to look for and the last hint will state where to find it. However, these hints aren't available when EVE is preoccupied, such as finding a key while she's assimilating an AI.
  • Humble Hero: In "The Iris Poisonous", the reason Ra-kha-ka, the royal food taster, hid his true identity of Ra-hakama-kh, Queen Chione's biological brother, is because he wanted to protect his brother-in-law Pharaoh Sebekem III instead of being treated like fellow royalty.
  • Inelegant Blubbering: Before her case is solved, when Lady Adler in the Steam Age finds that her property has been stolen by Arsene Volpin in around tick four, she spends the entirety of the remaining ticks throwing a screaming tantrum and rolling around on the floor crying.
  • Interface Screw:
    • EVE's Time Defrag subroutine takes up so much of her processing power that she has to suspend her human interface, so while it's running the screen changes color and the only messages you get from her are barely comprehensible.
    • Pre-boss battle searches take place with the screen becoming an increasingly bold shade of the mission's color. The Minutes to Midnight cases have three hunts in each age with the screen becoming increasingly whiter, as ORACLE comes closer to deleting history.
  • Interface Spoiler: Switching from tick to tick will fade out everything that has a chance of changing, not just the characters. This includes the large objects AVATAR drops on top of their victims.
  • It Will Never Catch On: The case "The Green Energy Idea" revolves around a female scientist named Timothea Craft who RAGE manipulates into a theft after she's a victim of Produce Pelting. Said pelting is caused by making a presentation about swapping from coal to more renewable energy sources, with EVE noting that she really was right about her theories.
  • Justice by Other Legal Means: A "Justice for Another Crime" variant that, due to time travel, prevents the initial crime from happening in the first place. For most murders and notable destruction of property, it's fairly easy to figure out who the culprit is. The problem is, because those crimes can't happen to keep the timeline intact, you have to instead track the culprit's route earlier in the day and catch them committing a lesser offense in preparation of the major crime in order to get them arrested before the greater crime can occur.
  • Leet Lingo: The fourth descendent to take on the Volpin identity, encountered in the futuristic Aeon age, stylizes their name as "V0lp1n x4".
  • Love Triangle: Multiple cases involve one that leads to one member instigating a crime, such as "The Brown Clay Pot" showing a man vehemently breaking up with a woman after he catches her falling for a Charm Person, "The Scarlet Snake" having a woman in an affair upsetting the man she's cheating with so much that he frightens her husband to death, and "The Amethyst Gate" having a girl murder her sister via Teleporter Accident so she can hook up with the sister's husband.
  • Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The Big Bad Duumvirate causing anomalous crimes by influencing people in the past are motivated by trying to change the future and create a timeline where their goals are achieved.
  • Mini-Game: Whenever the player needs to activate one of EVE's subroutines to decode a clue, it takes the form of a minigame, such as analyzing chemicals by organizing mixed stacks of symbols or looking up a suspect's profile by stopping roulette wheels of facial features at the right times.
  • My Future Self and Me: In "The Orange Clockwork", time traveler Walter Heisenburg, after failing to kill William Gloom under LEGACY's orders before he uncovers the Atlantean Sacred Stones, nearly causes a paradox by meeting his past self and warning him that their timeline is doomed. This is also the case where the player's informant reveals they're from a future in which ORACLE caused devastation and that they've set things up so the player got partnered with EVE in order to stop it before it's too late.
  • Mysterious Informant: After EVE defeats RAGE and starts assimilating him, EVE's systems start being hacked into without her awareness. From that point on, one of these starts contacting the player while asking to be kept a secret from EVE, wanting to help from outside the boundaries of the law and worried about EVE's increasing adaptability. Towards the end of the story, they turn out to be the player's future self, trying to mitigate the damage that a fully-restored ORACLE could cause.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: The official Launch trailer shows a summary of how to investigate cases, then ends with a sequence of the Big Bad Duumvirate walking through the various eras. In the game itself, only OBLIVION and RAGE directly interact with anyone, with the faces of the others only seen on the profiles EVE makes for them.
  • Noodle Incident: EVE will occasionally reference "historical" events that take place in the future and don't seem to make sense, such as puppets being declared illegal after the Information Age and how goats became legally punishable for their acts of destruction after the Great Goat Guerrilla of 2356.
  • No OSHA Compliance:
    • The technologically gifted Lost Age's preventative measure to warn people about a malfunctioning earthgate that has the capability to Teleporter Accident them is a single wooden sign with an "X" on it placed in front of said gate, which is easily removed in one case to get someone killed. Once the case is completed, the post-crime fix can be seen: multiple wooden signs with "X" on them.
    • The death that occurs in "The Brown Clay Pot" is due to a woman accidentally walking off of a building without any guardrails while reading a letter from her heartbroken boyfriend, who saw her cheating on him with a Charm Person.
  • One Degree of Separation: The Fulcrum Stories (optional assignments that aren't crime-focused) tend to cross over with each other as well as the main investigations in order to connect everyone, such as the Information Age showing "Johnny Weak" having to save his dog from accidentally being run over by Lorenzo Cinghialone's scooter and online influencer Jasper sneaking into the concert of Axl Blood, the victim of the case "The Red Blood-Stained Band".
  • Phantom Thief: The Volpins are a dynasty of these, with a descendant appearing in every era in order to steal Atlantean technology and fulfill The Promise made by their ancestor. Due to the family's importance to the timeline, namely how their thefts helped lead to the creation of ORACLE, the investigator can only mitigate the damage they do and are unable to ever properly apprehend them for their crimes.
  • Poor Communication Kills: The case of "The Iris Poisonous". Thanks to the aid of Chimera, the Pharaoh of the Lost Age sees his wife playing with his food taster and orders him poisoned, having her arrested for the crime. Over the course of the case it emerges that the food taster is actually the Pharaoh's brother-in-law, and he mistook sibling playfulness with infidelity.
  • Post-Stress Overeating: Prior to "The Brown Clay Pot" being solved, once Ceraon has written his angry letter and Aqua is on her way to falling to her death, the former indulges in a lot of ice cream through a flood of tears.
  • Produce Pelting: Timothea Craft is a victim of this in "The Green Energy Idea", as she's presenting her theory on how renewable energy will be better than coal to a bunch of coal barons that care more about their wealth than the environment.
  • The Promise: "Rust Tears in the Rain" reveals that the millennia-long streak of thefts by the Volpin family is motivated by a promise their ancestor made back in the Atlantean era. Having befriended the construct that was the prototype of the Atlantean robot guardians, the ancestor promised to help put it back together after the fall of Atlantis no matter how long it took. Unfortunately, this also makes the family an Unwitting Instigator of Doom, as the construct's soul, once it's reassembled in the Aeon Age, would also be used to create EVE and the AI threatening the entire timeline.
  • Ret-Gone: LEGACY can completely remove a person or their motivations from an Age, and solving the case doesn't bring the person back; at best, EVE can set up a different person to take their role.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Occasionally, you have to solve a crime committed by someone that's in charge of the Age's law enforcement, which means you have to find a way to remove their motive instead of getting them arrested. Examples include helping the head Guardian find a compatible partner so he doesn't crush another guardian out of Envy in the Atlantean Age, and showing the Pharaoh that his wife's "affair" with the food taster was actually just sibling playfulness in the Lost Age.
  • Secret War: During "The Golden Foot", EVE admits that one of these becoming no longer secret is the reason the Information Age eventually ended. The factions involved (all of which the Detective, by this point, has been introduced to in their ages of origin) were the Crimson Vow, the Atlantean Age-originating society to keep Atlantis' preserved secrets shrouded in myth after the Eternity Gauntlet ruined everything; the Eye of Ra, the Lost Age sect that believed in providence through technology; and New Dawn, the Evil Luddite faction from the Steam Age.
  • Shout-Out: The game is flooded with them.
  • Steampunk: The Steam Age, which features automata walking around alongside Gothically-dressed people, and has abundant gear-themed and steam-emitting architecture.
  • Teleporter Accident: The case "The Amethyst Gate" focuses on a Love Triangle between Jonas and two sisters, Havel and Kain, that ends with Kain removing a warning sign for a broken earthgate and watching Havel disintegrate herself with it. Unfortunately, the paradox is Kain getting away with it, not the murder itself,because  so Havel must remain dead in the True Timeline.
  • Tempting Fate: After passing the "Kobayashi Test" and officially joining the Time Police, EVE states that you can relax due to how rare disturbances to the True Timeline actually are. Immediately after, an alarm activates, and the player is thrust into a series of cases in which a group of masterminds are trying to alter the True Timeline.
  • Time Police: The player's job is to respond to temporal divergences caused by anomalous crime and identify the culprits in order to keep the timeline intact and prevent periods of history from being irreparably warped.
  • The Unmasqued World: In the True Timeline, the Information Age transitions into the Aeon Age after New Dawn manages to leak information about their Secret War with the Crimson Vow and Eye of Ra to the public. In the Aeon Age, there are three huge towers each dedicated to one of the three warring factions, while regular people are stuck in the "Flow", otherwise known as the sewer and garbage disposal layer. With that said, the Fulcrum Stories do show that the world is still not completely unmasqued, with one organization still helping to keep the existence of the squid-like Atlantean descendants a secret.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: All Roberto Beniamino wanted to do in "The Enigmatic Lime Drink" was play a prank by putting a pop-up puppet inside his university textbook, but it ended up scaring a teacher to death.
  • Verbal Backspace: During the final cases of the game, EVE starts referring to her own prowess and power upon absorbing the other artificial intelligences before rectifying it as "our" accomplishments and accuses the player of misunderstanding her.
  • Virtual Sidekick: Accompanying the player on their investigations is EVE, a digital assistant that helps keep track of clues found and can accomplish various tasks like decrypting ancient languages and tracing calls through quick mini-games.
  • What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: "The Amethyst Gate" focuses on a Love Triangle, and EVE becomes confused when one of the girls in it, Kain, acts more like a bird than a human (despite the fact that said character IS a bird). The Detective, in their own way, then has to inform EVE that Kain strutting around like a peacock in front of the newly-widower Jonas means that Kain's enamored by him.
  • World of Funny Animals: The various settings all feature a mix of human and anthropomorphic animal characters, such as one criminal in the Lost Age being a rat named Aten Black Tail that EVE notes is identifiable from other rats by his black tail. Despite this, EVE refers to all non-robot characters outside of the Atlantean Age as being humans.
  • X-Ray Vision: After assimilating RAGE into their system, EVE unlocks a subroutine that allows them to construct simulations of the interiors of buildings, allowing the Detective to find clues and characters previously obscured by walls. In the Aeon Age, it's also used to see through the thick smog that separates the three pillars of future society with the slums and sewage that most people actually live in.
  • You All Share My Story: "Five Minutes to Midnight" has the player use characters from various unconnected past cases as examples of virtues to dissuade ORACLE from deleting history, such as Deckard and Nina falling in love in the Aeon Age as a display of Love, the Axl Blood concert in the Information Age as a display of Music, and the siblings from "The Iris Poisonous" as a display of Family.

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