Press Kit — The Lens Detective

The Lens Detective is a location-based detective story played by walking your own city. Cases resolve on the real map around you, and nothing in the game can be solved from the sofa.

Everything on this page is free to quote and reproduce. If you need something that isn't here — a specific screenshot, a build to review, a longer interview — write to info@jousoft.fi.

Factsheet

Descriptions

One line

Find your way, walk the city, solve the puzzle. A detective story played outside.

Short

Your phone is the Lens: a surveillance tool that reveals echoes from the Lattice, a hidden network the city's authorities don't know exists. As a recruit in the Urban Investigation Bureau, you solve cases on the streets you already walk every day — decoding messages hidden in plaques and books, and catching operatives of the Syndicate of Silence before they erase what's left of the city's truth.

Full

Your phone is the Lens: a surveillance tool that reveals echoes from the Lattice, a hidden network the city's authorities don't know exists. You're a recruit in the Urban Investigation Bureau, and your handler Pracht has cases that need solving on the streets you already walk every day.

Solve real puzzles. Decode messages hidden in plaques and books. Catch operatives of the Syndicate of Silence before they erase what's left of the city's truth.

Your city is the case file. Cases unfold on the real map around you — a waypoint two streets away, a witness on the corner, a mark on a foundation stone you have to stand in front of to read. You find your own way there; nothing here can be solved from the sofa.

Agent Harding has disappeared. He left behind a badge, a number, and a cipher nobody uses any more. Over a season of cases you'll trace what he found: the Echoes who remember him, the folder he hid, and an organisation that would rather the city didn't look too closely at itself. Real history is woven through the cases.

This is a hand-crafted story with a beginning, a middle and an end — four hours or so of cases, playable wherever you can walk. Like a series of detective novels, except the next chapter happens when you go outside.

What makes it different

• It is finite and hand-written. A season with an ending, not a procedural treadmill. The comparison is a series of detective novels where the next chapter happens when you go outside.
• The city is the puzzle, not the backdrop. Tasks ask the player to read a real inscription, count real windows, stand in a real doorway. The answer is outdoors, not in a menu.
• Played with your head up. The screen says where; the world says what.
• Privacy is a design constraint, not a page. Analytics are off until the player opts in, and player coordinates are blocked from analytics in code, in every build — distances are reported as metres walked, never as positions or routes.

About the developer

I'm Jesse Kivialho, and when I was young I wanted to make computer games. It took a while. The Lens Detective is the first thing I've built that's mine, so now I can say I'm a solo developer from Helsinki.

I founded Jousoft Oy in 2009, but spent the years since doing IT management consulting and running a web agency, Verkkovaraani.

I've been in sea scouts my whole life; it's where I learned to sail, and where I spent a lot of my childhood in activities that involved a map, a set of instructions and somewhere to be. I studied Information Networks at Helsinki University of Technology, and in 2015–16 I sailed the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race as a watch leader and coxswain.

Every case in The Lens Detective was tested on foot, in Helsinki, by walking it.

Where the game came from

The idea came to me in 2024: a game that happens in the real world but uses the phone as a tool rather than as the place you look. It pulls from things I already loved — scout competitions, orienteering, The Amazing Race, detective shows, and the kind of story that runs on real history, in the way The Da Vinci Code does. But it still took until the beginning of 2026 to start building.

The design rule was simple: the phone tells you where to go, and then the answer has to be outside it. Count the windows on a real library. Find real world objects. Wait for a specific hour to come round. The game gives you nothing you could have got from the sofa.

The season is built on Cistercian numerals — a medieval shorthand where a single glyph can hold any number from 1 to 9999, used by monks in the thirteenth century and then almost completely forgotten. The game teaches you to read it in the first episode, and by the end of the season you're navigating by it. Season One is called thirteen fifteen, and the logo is that number written in the cipher. Nobody has to notice that. It's there for the people who do.

The other rule is that you need a notebook and a pen. The game genuinely does not keep your notes for you. Things you learn in the first episode are things you'll be asked to recall in the fourth, and if you didn't write them down you'll be standing on a corner trying to remember what a barista told you three weeks ago. That's the intended experience.

How the season fits together (contains spoilers)

Contains mild spoilers for Season One. Safe for a review; skip it if you'd rather play cold.

Season One has a spine, and the spine is a number. 13:15 turns up in the first case as two Cistercian glyphs on a café napkin, and the player decodes it without being told why it matters. Every episode after that adds a meaning: a date, a Bible verse, an operational timestamp, a password, a bearing, and finally the gap between two of the monastic prayer hours. By the finale the number is overdetermined — six independent reasons for the same four digits — and the player assembled every one of them personally.

There's a second thing running underneath. The season starts with invented history and quietly becomes real history. Early on, the Cistercians and the white monks and Cîteaux all sound like set dressing. Then a case names a person the player can look up and find was real, and from that point on the facts get more specific and more checkable — the Trappist vow of silence, the seven canonical hours, a 2001 monograph by a historian of science. The moment a player stops reading and starts searching is the moment the game is working.

The last case asks the player questions drawn from what they wrote down weeks earlier, in their own handwriting, in their own notebook. Then it makes them choose who to go after, and the choice is permanent.

On how it was made

I built this alone, and I used AI heavily to do it. I think that's worth stating plainly rather than leaving for someone to discover. For me, AI made it possible to make this game.

What that means in practice: AI wrote a great deal of the code, and I used it as a research assistant and a sounding board throughout. What it didn't do is the part that makes this game the game it is. The idea, the season structure, the fourteen cases and how they escalate, the decision that the player carries a paper notebook, the choice of Cistercian numerals as the spine, the pacing of the real-history reveal, which tasks are fun to walk and which ones only sound fun on paper — that's mine, and most of it was settled by walking the cases and finding out what didn't work.

I've spent nearly twenty years shipping software for other people's businesses. What changed in 2026 wasn't that I suddenly wanted to make a game — I've wanted that since I was a kid. It's that the gap between what one person can design and what one person can actually build got small enough to cross.

Assets

Everything below is free to use in coverage of the game. The captions on the screenshots here are page text, not part of the images — the files themselves are clean.

Download everything (.zip)

Screenshots

Also supplied at iPhone 6.9″ resolution (1320 × 2868) in press/screenshots-iphone-69/, inside the zip.

Logo and icon

The mark is a magnifier whose lens holds the Cistercian numeral for 1315 — the number Season One is named for. Please don't recolour it: it is only ever cyan #7FD9FF, white, or dark #0A0F1C, and the cyan version needs a dark background to stay legible. Leave clear space around it and don't add glows or shadows.

If you need something that isn't here — a different resolution, a specific moment captured, or a build to review — email info@jousoft.fi. The game is free to download, so the store listing is usually the fastest route to hands-on time.

Map data

Screenshots contain map data from © Mapbox and © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the ODbL. If you reproduce a screenshot, that credit travels with it.

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