Hey folks,

📢 Thank you so much for all your support and reviews, this means a lot to us!
We also heard your valid critique and are excited to announce this big balancing patch of The Darkest Files.

But before I tell you more about the update, we also want to share that we now have Trading Cards! You can now collect and trade the whole team of Mr. Bauer, plus the cat Marlene. 😻

🔍 Patch 1.0.5 was released on April 8 and is a major update that adds a lot of possible solutions for conclusions and interruptions, making the game less strict and more open to different ways of thinking. We also added a new difficulty mode for a more balanced experience. The changes in detail are as follows:

• Adjusted the difficulty of Investigator Mode to make it a little easier. (Removed the requirement to specify the paragraph in a given document and enabled the counter in the testimonies that shows how many optional interactables have been found). From the feedback we received, we feel that this more closely reflects the kind of "normal" difficulty that people are looking for - whereas in our minds, "Investigator Mode" was always designed to be "Hard Mode".
  
• Added a new difficulty setting, "Prosecutor Mode", which is the former Investigator Mode aka "Hard Mode".
  
• Added a lot more documents & paragraphs as possible solutions for interruptions and conclusions.
  
• Removed Esther's misleading comments when combining documents into conclusions.

The reworked Investigator Mode should hopefully make the game more approachable for those who want a bit of a challenge without wanting to choose the highest possible difficulty.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this new update and are looking forward to reading your feedback about the new difficulty mode and newly accepted solutions.

🔍 And if you are still on the fence if you want to play The Darkest Files, read here what the press has to say:

If you can’t get enough of our characters and beautiful artwork, and amazing soundtrack and want to support our work, you can buy the The Darkest Files Complete Edition to add to your collection! This gives you a 25% discount on everything - if you own parts of it already, you can complete the set and get the discount on every item you add!🕵️‍♀️

The bundle includes

• A Steam copy of the The Darkest Files
  
• "The Chronicles of Crime - Art and Fact", a digital art and factbook exploring concept art, character designs, and historical research that shaped the game.
  
• A lot of hand-drawn digital goodies like Digital Wallpapers, Emotes and Digital Stickers, and high-quality Printable Posters featuring stunning artwork from the game
  
• In-depth Character Sheets revealing detailed backstories, motivations, and secrets of all key characters
  
• The complete Original The Darkest Files Soundtrack by the amazing Almut Schwacke

Thank you so much for your support!

See you in court! <3

This is a major balance patch which adds a lot of possible solutions for conclusions and interruptions, making the game less strict and more open to different ways of thinking. We also added a new difficulty mode in between the easy and hard difficulty for a more balanced experience.

Dear prosecutors,

After watching a lot of you play and make reviews and community posts regarding the game’s difficulty, we’ve carefully taken notes and created a major balancing patch. The game is a lot less strict about what it considers the correct solution now as we’ve added many alternative combinations for conclusions as well as many more alternative correct solutions for interruptions during witness interviews. Many of the steps can be solved with more ways of thinking than we realized initially, and this patch addresses this.
Furthermore, after watching people struggle with the difficulty selection between only an easy-mode and a hard mode, we’ve now added a normal difficulty mode in between. The new mode in the middle no longer requires you to select individual paragraphs. This should hopefully make the game more approachable for those who want a bit of a challenge without wanting to choose the highest possible difficulty.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this new update and are looking forward to reading your feedback about the new difficulty mode and newly accepted solutions.

As with all updates, it can happen that new bugs are introduced, even though we thoroughly tested every newly added solution. So, if you encounter any bugs while playing, we’d be very grateful if you could report them by pressing F5 while in game.

See you in court!
Your Paintbucket team.

• Adjusted the difficulty of Investigator Mode to make it a little easier. (Removed the requirement to specify the paragraph in a given document, and enabled the counter in the testimonies that shows how many optional interactables have been found).
  From the feedback we received, we feel that this more closely reflects the kind of "normal" difficulty that people are looking for - whereas in our minds, "Investigator Mode" was always designed to be "Hard Mode".
  
• Added a new difficulty setting, "Prosecutor Mode", which is the former Investigator Mode aka "Hard Mode".
  
• Added a lot more documents & paragraphs as possible solutions for interruptions and conclusions.
  
• Removed Esther's misleading comments when combining documents into conclusions.

• Changed the used Anti-aliasing method(s) from MSAA + SMAA (Medium) to just SMAA (Quality), resulting in a sharper image and higher framerates on certain systems.

• Fixed an issue where the interruption UI would display its animations abnormally.
  
• Fixed Theresa being called Edwina in the court opening cutscene of the second case.
  
• Fixed a bug which can lead to players being stuck when entering a coworkers office.
  
• Fixed various typos and grammatical errors in all languages in the game.