How to speak like a detective in Epiphany Investigations

Gathering information from informants or people of interest is paramount to a detective’s job. For that reason, Erik will have two ways of speaking with people in Epiphany Investigations: the plain box method, and speech bubbles. Here’s how these two methods compare, and why there are two ways of speaking with people to begin with.

These simple boxes are the ones you’re used to seeing in many other video games. It swoops in from the bottom with a cool bounce effect, and begins typing out the text letter by letter. With these simple boxes, you can only advance the text every time you press the action button. Other features with these boxes include different-colored text and a small box that displays the speaker’s name. But beyond that, it’s your standard text box, and you will see this one the most. 

This is where speaking with people becomes more interesting. When speaking with someone who speaks with speech bubbles, besides having the features that speech boxes have, you will also notice two other things. First, you will see that the first and last bubbles have a background color that’s different from the rest. These are used to bookend the conversation. Next, if you hold down the ‘B’ key and press the arrow buttons (the game is still in development, so this may change), you will be able to scroll through the conversation and re-read the bubbles.

In real life, dialogue is normally linear, allowing the people having a conversation to keep it moving. It’s possible to return to a previous part of the conversation by asking the other person to repeat it. However, Erik possesses amazing powers (more details in a later post) that allow him to recall a conversation perfectly, removing the need for him to ask someone to repeat something they already said. For the player, this will become useful as you investigate things and gather details from speaking with people of interest. Perhaps you missed a vital detail? Simply scroll through the conversation to learn more.

Speaking with people is one of the most common actions you will perform in Epiphany Investigations. But talking to people is not the only way that you will be able to gather information. Next time, we’ll delve deeper into another common action that you will perform: profiling (working name) people and clues.