Borough Records Office Is A Detective Game About Filing

A slip of paper comes through a slot in the door. It asks for a document by a partial reference, a rough date, or in several cases a description of what the document is thought to contain. You find it, if it exists, and put it in the tray. That is the loop, repeated for nine hours.

Nothing in the game explains why any request has been made. There is a case going on somewhere in the building and you are not part of it, except that every piece of paper you locate is presumably part of it, and the ones you cannot locate are presumably a problem for somebody.

The request slips

The requests are the writing, and they are extremely good. A slip that asks for a licence application from a specific quarter is administrative. A slip that asks for the same application again, four hours later, with a note that the copy provided was incomplete, is a small event in a story you cannot see.

By the middle of the game I was reading the slips as a narrative, which they are, and which the game never acknowledges they are. Requests cluster around certain addresses. A name appears in three unrelated document types. Someone upstairs is looking for something specific and does not want to say what.

Being told nothing

The game's central decision is that no request is ever explained and no outcome is ever reported. You do not learn whether the document you found mattered, whether the case was resolved, or whether the person the slips keep circling was guilty of anything.

This should be unbearable and is instead the reason the game works. Because nothing is confirmed, everything I noticed remained mine, and by hour seven I had a theory I could not test and did not want tested. A game that resolved this would be a much lesser thing, and it very nearly does resolve it, which I will come to.

The drawer that was wrong

Around hour six I opened a drawer and found it in the wrong order. Not shuffled, not empty: sorted correctly by the wrong field, as though somebody had refiled it in a hurry using a different convention from the one the rest of the room uses.

Nothing marks this. No slip refers to it, no message appears, and the game does not care whether you notice. But the drawer covers the addresses the requests had been circling for two hours, and the implication, which the game will never confirm, is that somebody had been in this room before me and had been looking for the same things.

I re-sorted it. It took eleven minutes, no request had asked for it, and it is the best thing I did in any game this year.

What the game provides	What it withholds
Several hundred documents	Any statement of the case
Requests with partial references	The reason for any request
A physically consistent room	Confirmation that you noticed anything
One drawer sorted wrongly	Any acknowledgement of it

Where it falls short

The final twenty minutes almost ruin it. A last sequence of slips arrives which, read in order, does effectively state the case, and it converts eight and a half hours of inference into a summary I had not asked for. It is not a cutscene and it is not explicit, but it is close enough to explicit that the drawer I re-sorted became, retroactively, a clue rather than a suspicion.

The other complaint is mechanical. Searching is done through a drawer interface that is deliberately slow, which is correct for the first three hours and tedious for the last three. There is a difference between a game asking for patience and a game asking for the same twenty seconds four hundred times, and this crosses that line somewhere around hour six.

Element	Assessment
Hours one to eight	Exceptional; inference without confirmation
Final twenty minutes	Explains too much
Drawer interface	Right early, tedious late
The wrongly sorted drawer	The best moment in this issue