Brain Freeze

San Francisco, 1946: a chill rainy dead October night. Murder’s afoot, and only Chief Cheese has what it takes to get to the bottom of it. As a World War II veteran, a prophetic crime solver, and a hopelessly romantic dairy product, he knows that sometimes the best cop for the job is a crooked cop. If only his partner weren’t a by-the-book stick of chalk. Experience a psychoanalytical cat-and-mouse, mouse-and-cheese mind game like no other as you break into a house, fall in love with a suspect, hit the sauce, and fire a nuclear bullet at a family pet. Sometimes you crack the case, but sometimes the case cracks you.

Features:

• A charcuterie board laden with ten bite-sized levels of logic puzzles and grossly incompetent gunplay, each different from the last. The rookie on the case, Chalk, squares off against puzzles based on classics like lock picking, Masyu, Sokoban, and those Zelda sliding-block puzzle-things. Cheese, on the other hand, has to experiment with his own counterintuitive mechanics to shoot, drink, and shoot his way to the Truth. What, you expect it to be easy for a wedge of Swiss to aim a revolver?

• A thrillingly overwritten detective story that pours out hot and heavy as fondue, enriched with Fourth Amendment violations, unrequited love-confessions, and visionary hallucinations. You may be on duty, Officer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a meme-filled donut sprinkled with LOLs while you’re at it.

• Pixel art sharper than aged cheddar.

• Music funkier than blue cheese. Smoky-smooth jazz? Check. A cover of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 summoned forth by the devil’s own synthesizer? Check. Sheer auricular madness? Check.

We began working on this game during the third Thinky Puzzle Game Jam, whose theme was Chalk and Cheese.