Riverbay Falls Case Files

Two murders the police closed without an answer. The files went into the records annex, and a clerk down there kept copies and went through them with a red pen. You get her copy. Every case is free. Not free for now, not free until launch; FREE YOU WILL NEED THE WEBSITE: riverbayfalls.com Two of the six numbers you need are not in the PDF. They are held on the police department's terminals at riverbayfalls.com, and you go and get them while you play. The pack on its own gets you four letters and stops. That is the game, not a catch. Have the site open on a phone or a second tab before you start. WHAT YOU DO Six numbers are ringed in red across the file. Turn each one into a letter with the decoder, and the six letters spell the name of the person who did it. It is not one of the four people the police interviewed, and nothing in the pack calls that person a suspect. Four of the six numbers are on the paper. Two are not. The other two are still on the police department's system, and you go and get them: 1. The access log. The file gives you a door code. Run it on the department's door terminal and it prints the full record — a number for your answer, and a camera reference. 2. The camera. Type that reference into the evidence monitor and it gives you back one frame of CCTV. A number on the tape counter, and a number on the back of somebody's coat. 3. The roster. That coat number matches exactly one row in the pack. 4. The felon index. Type the six letters in and the department tells you who you caught. The terminals are real and they are at riverbayfalls.com. Every code in the log returns a genuine record, including the ones that lead nowhere, so it is worth poking at. THE CASES Case 001 — The Last Ferry. March 2032. A night supervisor is found dead behind the ticket office counter, the till open and the rain still coming down. Four people were in the terminal that night. The file closed in nine weeks as a robbery that went wrong. Case 002 — Collection Day. October 2032. A refuse loader is found under the lifter arm of his own lorry on the morning of the first frost, four days after he was made permanent. The council recorded it as an accident. They are separate crimes with separate people. Play them in either order. WHAT YOU NEED A pen. That is the whole list. You do not have to print anything. The file reads fine on a phone or a laptop — open it, write the six ringed numbers on any scrap of paper, and decode them on the last page. Printing is nicer if there are a few of you round a table and you want to spread the documents out. - 9 pages per case, PDF - About 75 minutes - One player, or four round a table - Ages 14 up. No reading age barrier, but the subject matter is a murder investigation. - No account, no email, no sign-up, nothing to unlock ABOUT Riverbay Falls is a fictional city. It is also the setting of a crime novel, The Etheron Files: The Devil's Playground, but the cases are standalone — you do not need the book to play, and reading the book will not tell you the answers. Written by Zachary M Foster. ABOUT AI, SINCE ITCH ASKS Yes, this was made with AI, and I would rather say so plainly than have someone find out. I set the crimes, the people, the motives and the rules. The case documents were written with Claude. The booking photographs of the people you catch are AI-generated images. The code behind the packs, and behind the terminals on the website, was written with Claude too. What is not AI: the photographs behind the CCTV stills are mine, run through code that degrades them into camera frames. The music on the site is synthesised from scratch in code — no model and no training data, just arithmetic. The novel the city comes from is a different matter and I will not muddle the two: I wrote that myself first, and used AI to edit and expand it afterwards. If that is a dealbreaker for you, better you know it now than three pages in. If you play one, tell me how it went. Comments are open below, and I would rather hear that something was confusing than not hear it.