Terms of Play
Last updated: July 2026
The game
Culprit is a work of interactive fiction. Every case contains a fictional depiction of murder; content warnings are shown in each case briefing. Suspects are AI actors — their dialogue is generated on the fly and can be wrong, strange, or unfair. Nothing in the game is real, and nothing in it is advice.
Fair use
Daily allowances (questions, commissions, illustration) exist so the game stays free to play. Don't abuse the AI systems, attempt to extract other players' data, or use commissioned mysteries to generate abusive or unlawful content — we can refuse, remove, or moderate generated content and suspend access for abuse.
Your mysteries
You own the briefs you write. Generated cases are yours to play and share; we keep a copy to run them, and (if a future community library launches) nothing becomes public without an explicit publish step.
The service
Every published case is free to play, always, and no account is required. Optional subscriptions buy a larger daily interrogation allowance and room to commission mysteries of your own — never access to a case somebody else can play for free. Prices are shown on the pricing page in GBP and are billed monthly until cancelled; you can cancel at any time from your account, and your commissioned cases remain yours. The service is provided as-is and is still in active development: features may change and outages happen. We may update these terms; material changes will be noted here with a new date. Questions — see Privacy.