![]() And of course, the whole ‘Sherlock Holmes of Ancient China’ was an appealing notion to me. That sort of reignited my interest in Di Renjie. Even though I had read a few of the Judge Dee books by Robert van Gulik some years before, it never really occurred to me that the character could have such wide appeal. “As a native Cantonese speaker (I’m originally half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese), I’ve been watching Hong Kong television and movies since I was very young, so when Tsui Hark – one of my favorite directors – announced in 2010 that he was doing a Detective Di movie, I immediately took notice. “It took a long time to settle on the idea of what this first major game would be about, but I knew I wanted to create something more personal – I wanted to tell a story that comes from my cultural heritage and background,” Minh said in an interview. After developing smaller games in Flash for many years, Ta finally decided to build a beefier project, and drew from his Chinese roots for inspiration. Minh Ta, the founder and main face behind Nupixo Games, was fueled by all of these media interpretations when it came time to flesh out Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders. More recently, celebrated Hong Kong director Tsui Hark filmed a Detective Di trilogy from 2010 to 2018, with Andy Lau portraying the detective in the series’ first entry, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Van Gulik and a variety of other authors, both Chinese and non-Chinese, would go on to write dozens of tales starring the titular judge, and actor Khigh Dhiegh played him in the 1974 television movie Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, which notably starred an all-Asian cast aside from Dhiegh himself. The story, roughly inspired by the real cases of Di Renjie, was published in 1949 as the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. Di became internationally known after the 18th-century story Di Gong An (Cases of Judge Dee) was translated into English by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat in East Asia. ![]() While Di Renjie might be a newcomer in the adventure game scene, the esteemed detective has made a potent mark in the literary and film worlds, and is often described as a Chinese Sherlock Holmes. As the game progresses, Di must put the pieces together to solve a larger conspiracy embroiling Empress Wu Zetian, the first and only female ruler of China. ![]() Players must guide Di at the start of his investigatory career as he solves a series of crimes, ranging from the death of a Korean diplomat to a trail of brutally desecrated bodies in China’s then-capital city of Chang’an. Unlike those games, however, Detective Di stars a legendary Chinese protagonist.ĭi Renjie – a county magistrate who lived during China’s Tang and Zhou dynasties – takes center stage in Canadian developer Nupixo Games’ first major adventure game, which came out on the PC in 2019 following a successful Kickstarter and has since been released on the Switch. Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is a mystery point and click adventure game, channeling the same energy as classics of the genre like The Dagger of Amon Ra and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. ![]()
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