Provisional Detective

Provisional Detective

SteefMakesGames · February 24, 2022 · Detective, Visual Novel, Walking Simulator, Investigation, Exploration

Provisional Detective is free to play — no purchase needed. We track it so you know if that ever changes.

PC
Mostly Positive75% · 12
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →

Screenshots

Provisional Detective price

Provisional Detective is free to play — there is no purchase price, on Steam or anywhere else we track. We keep watching it, so if it ever stops being free the price history on this page will show when that happened and what it changed to.

About Provisional Detective

Recommended to play with keyboard and mouse, only partial controller support

During a hard day of work at Syn Archives, you hear an alarm go off! Suddenly, you and your coworkers are stuck inside the building. You are asked by your manager to figure out what has happened, and to report back to him. Time to put on your detective's hat and figure out what transpired!

Provisional Detective is a mystery solving game, where with the help of an ancient artifact you try to figure out what happened in the facility! Inspired by games like Paradise Killer and Danganronpa, you walk around a sci-fi inspired environment where through dialogue with the various NPC's you try to figure out all the information there is to find an explanation for the situation at hand. The dialogue includes branching paths and a bit of humor. Enjoy finding out more about Syn Archives where you, the protagonist, work for through reading documents and talking to the NPC's.

Feel like a true detective when you ultimately have to choose what exactly happened and how it came to be! Through clues and your own intuition you will have to show what you have found during your investigation, but be careful! One small mistake in your logic and you might give the wrong information to your manager, resulting in perhaps the wrong person being accused!

Provisional Detective — game info

Platforms
Windows
Steam Deck
Unsupported
Player modes
Single-player
Controller
Partial controller support
PC Game Pass
Not included

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

✦ AI summary

Provisional Detective is a free detective game with an interesting narrative-driven mystery concept that some players find engaging and addictive, but it suffers from significant technical issues including soft locks, getting stuck in environments, and dialogue bugs that force game restarts. While the graphics and core mystery-solving idea show promise, the game feels unfinished and poorly polished, with players noting it's built largely from Unity asset store materials and lacks the refinement expected even for a free title.

Recommended May 18, 2025
Okish free detective game.
4 found this helpful
Not recommended Dec 31, 2024
"Provisional Detective" is a rather basic Unity asset flipped adventure game. Enjoy a standard Unity first person adventure game template populated with Unity Asset Store assets, wonder why it's so badly made, and then give up like both of the other people who bothered to play this. The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't n…
2 found this helpful
Not recommended Apr 1, 2023
Very unfinished/unpolished. Might be the only person to even play this, I see what they were trying to do but it was just not done well. Got soft locked on a terminal and just stopped playing. Should be free or demo.
2 found this helpful
Recommended Mar 17, 2026
Provisional Detective is a compact, narrative-driven mystery that leans more toward experimentation than convention, offering a stripped-down investigative experience built around interpretation rather than mechanical complexity. Developed and published by SteefMakesGames, it places you inside a small, contained sci-fi setting where a sudden lockdown turns an ordinary workday into a puzzle of missing information, conflicting accounts, and quiet suspicion. The game doesn’t rely on spectacle or elaborate systems; instead, it asks a simpler question—how well can you observe, connect details, and decide what really happened? The structure of the game revolves around exploration and conversation. You move through a limited environment, speaking with coworkers, reading documents, and piecing together fragments of a story that is never presented in a straightforward way. Rather than guiding you through a linear chain of clues, the game allows information to surface organically, often depending on where you choose to go and who you choose to speak with first. This gives the experience a sense of openness, even within its small scale, and reinforces the idea that you are not just uncoverin…
1 found this helpful
Not recommended Nov 8, 2024
At some point I got stuck at a walking path, I was unable to move, and there is no way to start a new game. There was just no way to get unstuck.
1 found this helpful
Recommended Mar 5, 2026
i love this game play i hope they do more with it, on the edge of my seat i wish it was more it is very interesting and addictive! Great job Dev(s)! Love the concept of this game. If you could add instructions of artifact easily accessible incase we don't get back to the game for a bit and forget how to use it properly. Some areas have glitches when talking to janitor for example you can't back out, you have to end game and go back in a couple of other actions as well the same thing. All in all this is a great idea graphics are awesome, gripping game. Thank you for letting us be a part of it!

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