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

Provided as-is, free of charge, and 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.