The Last Case of John Morley is a noir detective game that nails the atmosphere but fumbles the actual mystery, leaving you wandering through a very pretty cold case that never really lets you do the detective work yourself. There are some strong moments, a solid premise, and a genuinely eerie 1940s vibe, yet the investigation is so blunt and tightly controlled that it often feels like you are just following instructions rather than cracking a case.
A Strong Noir Setup
You play as John Morley, a seasoned private eye in 1940s London who is just out of hospital after a previous case literally threw him off a waterfall. Flat broke, abandoned by his assistant, and stuck in a rundown office, he is handed one last lifeline when Lady Margaret Fordside arrives with a fat paycheque and a 20‑year‑old murder that still haunts her.
Her daughter Elody was killed at Bloomsbury Manor two decades earlier, the police pinned it on convenient scapegoats, and she is convinced the real culprit walked away untouched. Morley takes the job, heads to the long‑abandoned estate, and quickly finds that this supposedly quiet review of old evidence is anything but, as the investigation drags him into forgotten places and secrets that never stayed buried.
Exploration First, Detective Work Second
On paper, John Morley sounds like a proper detective adventure: first‑person exploration, environmental clues, and crime‑scene reconstruction in gloomy mansions and sanatoriums lit by a blue moon. You comb through dusty rooms, read letters, examine objects, and use a special “reconstruction” vision to replay moments from the past and piece together how events unfolded.
The problem is that, in practice, the game rarely trusts you to do much actual deduction. Clues tend to funnel you toward one obvious conclusion at a time, and progressing is more about finding the correct hotspot or trigger than weighing up suspects, motives, or conflicting testimony. For a game sold as a mystery, you spend surprisingly little time genuinely unsure of what happened.
Atmosphere Doing Heavy Lifting
If the mystery is oddly lightweight, the mood does at least try to carry the weight. The Last Case of John Morley leans hard into 1940s noir: foggy London streets, creaking manor halls, abandoned medical facilities, and a constant sense that someone might be just out of sight, watching. There is very little direct threat, but the sound design and lighting keep you uneasy, as if something could finally step out of the shadows at any moment.
The story also has a few well‑timed spikes – revelations about Elody’s life, hints of supernatural elements, and personal fallout from Morley’s previous case – that briefly give the narrative some teeth. Unfortunately, these moments are surrounded by long stretches where you are simply trudging from room to room waiting for the next scripted twist to arrive.
A Detective Kept At Arm’s Length
For a game that revolves around a veteran detective on his final big case, Morley himself feels oddly distant. He has a solid backstory – broken from his last investigation, struggling with debt, trying to reclaim a sense of purpose – but the writing often holds him at arm’s length, leaving you with a competent narrator rather than a truly compelling lead.
The supporting cast is similarly thin. Lady Fordside and the figures tied to Elody’s death are presented more as vehicles for exposition than as fully realised people, which weakens the emotional punch of the eventual answers. When you finally uncover what happened, it lands as “okay, that makes sense,” instead of “wow, that changes everything.”
Verdict: A Cold Case That Never Heats Up
Clocking in at around three hours, The Last Case of John Morley is a compact, linear noir story with good atmosphere and a promising hook that never quite blossoms into a satisfying mystery. The environments are moody, the premise is strong, and there are flashes of something more, but the detective work is so guided and the characters so underused that there is very little room for players to feel clever or surprised.
If you are in the mood for a short, spooky 1940s walk through creaky mansions and forgotten institutions, it delivers a decent evening’s worth of eerie exploration. If you came looking for a proper whodunit where your own deductions matter, though, this last case lives up to the subtitle: a mystery without much actual mystery to solve.
