Inspiration
Time is what makes missing persons cases terrifying. The 72 hours where someone's life kept moving and nobody knew to pay attention. What were they doing? Where did they go? The clues were all there in real time, just unprocessed. We wanted to build something that made you feel that urgency without a countdown clock in your face.
What it does
LAST SEEN drops you into a missing persons case with exactly 72 hours of a stranger's life to reconstruct. Instagram posts, text messages, Google searches, past purchases, location pings, bank history, call logs - the evidence is all timestamped, out of order, and yours to sort through. You're not racing against time. You're moving through it, forwards and backwards, trying to piece the story together.
How we built it
React frontend, all custom CSS. Evidence drops in waves — you start with five cards, more unlock as you dig in, so the case grows alongside the investigation. The hardest design problem was timestamps: some records have them, some don't, and working out which is which is half the puzzle. We ran blind playtests to make sure the timeline held up without us standing over anyone's shoulder.
Challenges we ran into
Time is the theme, but a ticking clock felt wrong for this game as pressure would break the investigation mood entirely. Figuring out how to make timestamps matter without turning it into a race took a few iterations. We also hit the usual drag-and-drop mess building the evidence board. What sounds like a two-hour feature almost swallowed all our time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The 72-hour structure actually holds up as a mechanic. Players move through the victim's last three days and the timeline starts fuzzy, then sharpens as evidence connects. When it clicks - when someone says "oh, that's what Thursday night meant" - that's the feeling we tried to invoke.
What we learned
Structuring a mystery around a timeline is harder than structuring one around a location or a suspect. Time has a double duty: it's both the theme and the primary way players organize information. Getting that balance right meant rewriting the first case almost entirely 2 hours through the hackathon.
What's next for LAST SEEN
More cases, each built around a different kind of disappearance and a different 72-hour window to reconstruct. We want to add a personal timeline feature where players map out the victim's last days themselves before seeing the answer. Eventually, we want to implement a community case-builder, letting people design their own 72-hour mysteries and share them.
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