You did it, now you have one minute to doctor the scene and a grilling to survive, lying consistently enough to walk free.
This is a deduction puzzle in reverse: instead of solving the crime, you committed it. During a 60-second tamper phase you rearrange the room to bury the evidence. When the detective arrives, every object you touched becomes a question, answer to match the scene you left, and keep your suspicion meter low until the verdict.
Inverting the mystery is an established literary form, not a new idea: the inverted detective story shows the crime first and makes the interest lie in whether the culprit is caught, which is how Columbo worked for thirty years.
The original design gives you the tamper phase. You have sixty seconds to rearrange the room and bury the evidence, and afterwards every object you touched becomes a question you must answer consistently.
That is the part the literary form cannot do. A reader watches the culprit's story hold or fail; here you author it under time pressure and then have to remember it, so the puzzle is not covering your tracks but keeping straight the account you improvised.
Reverse Detective is an original free browser game that inverts the classic detective deduction genre, you are the culprit covering tracks instead of the sleuth uncovering them. Built in-house for PlayPendium, it runs entirely in your browser.