Query Noir

The city keeps records. Somebody in them is lying.

You are Sam Halloran, night-shift technician at Bay City Municipal Data Services. You do not carry a gun. You do not kick down doors. You read the city’s databases like witness statements — guest lists, parking logs, phone records, ledgers — and you find the one row that does not fit.

Query Noir is a detective game built around a single idea: the interrogation is a query. Every case is a real dataset. Every lead narrows it. The last row standing is your killer.

Ask questions, not syntax

There is no text field and nothing to memorise. You assemble every question from readable blocks and dropdowns:

• SHOW ME the guest list WHERE Outfit is ‘white suit’
• AND Last Seen is after 23:30
• CONNECT TO Vehicles — whose car used the alley gate?

As you build, the game writes the matching SQL next to your blocks and a plain English sentence underneath it. You solve the case first; the language arrives on its own. By the last chapter you are reading JOINs, GROUP BY and IS NULL without ever having been made to study them.

Sixteen cases, one conspiracy

• Prologue — a missing receipt, and a guided first night on the job.
• The Basics — six optional cases, each built around one new idea, where the new idea is always the step that breaks the case open.
• The Syndicate — a murder outside a club pulls a thread through the whole city.
• Checkmate — follow the money to the man who thought the records would never be read.

Every case opens with a hand-illustrated noir comic, hands you a client memo and a chain of leads, and ends at the accusation board: five faces, one name to say out loud. Say the wrong one and the file stays open.

Features

• No typing, ever. Dropdown-only input. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, no syntax errors.
• Real datasets. Every case is a small, hand-authored database you can actually explore, including the rows that lead nowhere.
• Learn by solving. Filters, comparisons, ranges, sorting, limits, joins, grouping and empty values, introduced one at a time and always at the moment they crack the case.
• Reputation and ranks. Close cases on truth, efficiency and independence to climb from Night-Shift IT Temp to The Query Detective.
• Hand-drawn noir. Ink-and-wash comics and character portraits over a pixel-art night office, a CRT scanline filter, rain on the window.
• A score that never repeats itself. Procedurally synthesised noir jazz, rain ambience and dry interface sounds.
• Eight languages. Full English, German, French, Italian, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Portugal) and Turkish, including every case, comic caption and hint.
• Three save slots, no timers, no fail states. Take the whole night.

Who it is for

If you like deduction games where the answer is genuinely in front of you, and if you have ever wanted to understand what a database query actually says, this is a case file with your name on it.