Hope in the City trades the detective’s badge for a sketchbook, out November 11

Most detective games hand you authority: a badge, a warrant, a room full of suspects who have to answer. Hope in the City gives you a 17-year-old art student whom nobody wants to talk to, and makes her sketchbook the main investigative tool.

The game from Lofty Sky Games comes out on November 11 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, both through Xbox and Steam, and is in Xbox Game Pass from launch. Hope Song lives in Shenyang, in northeast China, and is about to leave for art school abroad when she returns home to a ransacked apartment and no parents.

Clues, conversations and observations all end up as entries in her notebook, and any two can be combined. Pairs that fit become insights or breakthroughs that open new dialogue, places and leads. The studio says the idea came from Hope’s position: she cannot demand answers out loud, but on paper she can question anything. Early playtests turned up a dull problem, as mismatched pairs produced the same stock line every time. The writers responded by giving every combination its own reaction, from a joke to a nudge towards the right answer, so wrong guesses are not punished with silence.

The notebook art is handmade. Artist Calista Antonio drew more than 100 sketches for it, posing characters with the game’s 3D models first and then finishing pages with linework and digital watercolor, closer to quick impressions than polished illustrations.

She also shares part of Hope’s story. Antonio has Chinese heritage and, like her character, left Asia at 17 to study art in Canada, and some of her own paintings hang on the walls of Hope’s bedroom in the game.

Reported by Xbox Wire. Compiled with AI tools.