Silver Palace Case Structure and Chapters

How is the main story structured?

The CBT2 build contains a prologue and four acts. Press described the release as the first four chapters dropped at once, and the story ends mid-arc. The acts are case-driven: you arrive, investigate, and the act closes when the case does.

Only a few act names are public in English. Act IV is "Into the Dark", taken from the CBT2 story videos. Official English announcements from the first test named Act II Scene II: The Constabulary and Act II Scene IV: The Truth. Other act and scene titles have not been published, so any list that fills in all four acts is guessing.

What does the prologue teach?

The prologue is the tutorial, and an unusually story-heavy one. It moves the clock back three years to the honours ceremony aboard the Floating Palace and teaches movement, jumping, the grapple, observation and interaction in the middle of the assassination attempt. The two leads split up, so the tutorial also introduces the double-viewpoint structure the game keeps using later.

It ends with the crashes and the first major boss: Life and Death, officially Vita et Mors, a two-bodied creature formed from runaway Silverium, with a female figure and a demon locked together. The fight is slow and heavy rather than fast, and it is staged as spectacle. After it, the story jumps forward three years to the Detective's return.

What is the Cinderella case?

It is the spine of the CBT2 main line. The case is a series of charred bodies, and the scene that defines it is a single high-heel left behind. Structurally it follows the fairy tale: the girl who sweeps the ashes every day becomes the exploited factory women whose deaths the city would rather not count. The main chain links the three-year-old disaster to a first case of collective self-immolation, then to the reporter, then to a phantom thief and a hospital chase.

The case is also where the game's habit of naming arcs after fables becomes explicit: the fairy tale is the shape of the crime, not a decoration around it.

What does the reporter case add?

A reporter is found burned to a corpse in an alley. The obvious reading is a fire, and the fair-play clue that overturns it is a contradiction in the autopsy: the reported age does not match the body, and the residue at the scene tests as a fire retardant. Both facts are put in front of you before the conclusion, which is what makes the reveal fair rather than a twist.

The case does two jobs: it teaches you to distrust the first explanation, and it shows how the city's institutions file a convenient cause of death.

What is the bank case?

On the surface it is a phantom-thief story: a daring robbery, a masked culprit, a chase. Underneath it is the collapse of a Ponzi scheme. The theft is the visible event; the fraud is the reason the money was there to steal, and the people who lose are the ones who trusted the institution.

This case ties the main line most directly to the city's power structure. A phantom thief is a romantic figure; a Ponzi scheme is a business model, and the pairing says who gets called a criminal and who gets called an investor.

What is The Mystery of the Revived Corpse?

It is Firtho's character side case. It runs through eight stages and opens with a newspaper about the Royal Society studying vampires, a deliberately Holmesian hook. From there it moves between the clinic, a cemetery, a mansion, a tavern and a research facility, mixing scene investigation, interviews, combat, puzzles and clue reconstruction.

It has three endings, and the one you reach depends on which evidence you accept: the baron, the young master or the butler can each be the culprit in a different resolution. You can rewind to a key decision point and reason again, which makes the case a teaching tool for the evidence system rather than a single correct answer. The Motives page explains why the same content also exists as a weapon item.

Is the detective work actually fair?

The design rule is yes: every clue needed for the conclusion should be on screen before the conclusion. Observation reveals traces, witnesses give testimony, the Detective Board collects it, and the Mind Palace reconstructs events. Some testimony is plausible but fails a cross-check, which is the intended kind of misdirection rather than a concealed fact.

The second test changed evidence handling. Instead of taking an item from an evidence room, evidence is locked in a safe and the scene must be reasoned through before it opens. That turns observation into a gate rather than a flavour action. The detective gameplay page covers the full loop.

Is there a dialogue history feature?

It has been promised but not shipped in CBT2. The official feedback letter after the second test listed a dialogue history feature as a planned addition, alongside more indoor scenes and more weight on deduction. Treat it as a launch-window promise until the build shows otherwise.

Common questions