The main theme of Mainlining is techno-ethics, is it acceptable for an organisation to have the power to look at the public's personal data, and what if someone else got the key to that.
Being set in an alternative universe it lets us play around with the idea of this Military body with so much power they become unruly, letting the play choose if they will stand up and arrest people fairly or if they themselves will be rewarded but guilty by association.
Cases are made up of three distinct phases, each one consisting of about ten triggerable events; interactions such as delivering emails, chat messages and AI responses. These events offer about half an hour of active plot development. The player, meanwhile, will spend more time in between events searching and cross-referencing information. This allows the game to deliver cases that should last between twenty to forty minutes.
The three phases are presented thusly. The first is preliminary, discovering information about the case, searching for clues that will take the player to their first lead, laying out the initial trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Players will always be sent a case file at the start of each mission that will help outline the objective.
The middle phase will make up the bulk of each case. Players must use the tools provided by MI7 to help them unravel the information they will need to make a successful arrest. As the game progresses this will become more complex with multiple suspects for the player to investigate and different evidence to uncover.
The final phase players will experience is the end game of each case in which suspects, their location and incriminating evidence are submitted and an arrest made. Hopefully, players will have made the right choices and a conviction secured.
So you can understand the anatomy of a simple case, the screenshot above demonstrates the flow of a fictitious scenario.