Okay, let's do something silly. Let's talk about a video game where anthropomorphized animals pay homage to every noir trope while trying to solve a murder that dovetails into a city wide conspiracy involving the occult, alternate dimensions, and notable scientist Erwin Schrödinger. Because why not?
Oh, there's also an archivist and a municipal archives!
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Released in 2025 by beyondthosehills, Cat Detective Albert Wilde is exactly what it says on the tin. Albert Wilde is your typical noir detective: a down on his luck, deep voiced, unimaginably dense cat prone to internal monologuing and incredible leaps in logic. Whenever Albert shows up, everyone in the room sighs in annoyance because they know he's going to add more work, waste their time, or both. And no one is shy about telling Albert exactly how they feel about his general existence. It's hilarious!
The writing, as well as the voice acting from Alastair Hamblin as Albert, is perfect. The game is self-aware enough about the noir genre without wearing out its welcome, which allows for the increasingly bizarre story beats and plot twists to exist without causing narrative whiplash. It's a slow buildup to all the weird stuff, but when the weird stuff hits you can see exactly how they got from Point A to Point B.
But I digress, the story itself revolves around Albert attempting to solve the gruesome possible murder of a cat with a very peculiar collar. A collar that seems to be of interest to the criminal underground, the police, and the upper class. As the conspiracy unfolds, Albert realizes he needs to visit the municipal archives to find information about past cases involving strange cat appearances. That's where we meet the Archivist.
Yup, he's an elephant! He also doesn't have a name and is only ever referred to as the Archivist by the game. Anyway, the Archivist is about as helpful as you'd expect a government-employed information manager to be when a dumb as soup private investigator come looking for additional resources to maybe solve the case. By which I mean he isn't. To the game's credit, they do offer a plausible reason why the Archivist lacks incentive to provide any help at all. Because he's an elephant, the city assumes he can remember everything. So, instead of paying for equipment and supplies to maintain an organizational structure, they rely on the Archivist to just know what's in the case files.
You might think that's ridiculous, but I can say that there are institutions, as well as users, who believe archivists should have that level of recall when it comes to archival holdings. There's an unspoken assumption that archivists magically know everything they have in their vast repository, which simply isn't true. Depending on the institution's history, employee turnaround of the archives, and the general state of documented institutional knowledge and finding aids, archivists often operate at a deficit when it comes to their awareness of materials contained in every collection. If we had infinite time and funds and labor to perform the type of item-level description people want, then maybe archivists might have a larger pool of knowledge to draw from, but even then it would still be impossible to retain that much information.
That being said, I do appreciate the irony of making the Archivist an elephant and playing with the idea of how reliable his memory actually is regarding evidence and case files. Most of the jokes boil down to the Archivist being lazy and shirking his duties because he doesn't get paid enough to care and no one's stopped him yet. I respect this strategy because it's highly relatable. But when it comes to following protocol and probably (mostly) giving Albert a hard time, the Archivist is quick to let our feline detective that if he wants to submit evidence to the archives, he needs to go through the proper channels. That's how we get to the one mini-quest involving the archives.
For some context, the strange cat collar in Albert's possession is linked to a quantum teleporter - trust me, it makes sense in the game - which allows Albert to teleport to wherever the collar is located. When he's in the archives, the Archivist won't let him access the files for the sake of research. The only way to gain access is to submit evidence for a case. Additionally, the Archivist won't allow Albert to just hand over evidence. No, he has to mail the collar to the archives via courier as part of the official procedure.
It's unnecessarily convoluted bureaucracy at its best. Albert follows the instructions and gets the collar into the archives, and by "in the archives" I mean the Archivist tossed the collar into the trashcan because dude doesn't give a shit and is probably connected to the greater conspiracy. After teleporting into the archival trashcan, Albert is able to look at other cases, which leads him to Case 4666 and the reveal that four separate underworld bosses are involved in multiple cases of strange cat appearances and/or deaths. We also learn that the authorities are purposefully disregarding and destroying anything related to these cat cases. To Albert, it means more leads to track down, but it's also the end of any significant use of the archives.
We do see the Archivist again, much later in the game, when Albert goes to the forested area outside the city, presumably to confront the occult group involved in the weird cat cases. He happens to run into every animal he's ever interacted with in the game, at the same time, one of which is the Archivist. For context below, the game shifts to color for this whole segment and Albert immediately calls attention to it once the noir filter disappears.
I will say I was pleasantly surprised by how much the archives would feature in this game. Granted, it's maybe a 10-20 minute piece of roughly six hours of gameplay, but it moves the story along, shows how the quantum teleporter works, and makes some astute observations about the police and their efficacy at solving crimes. The Archivist is an intentional obstacle playing into animal stereotypes, but he's also a commentary on the plight of civil servants within a corrupt system.
Win-win, if you ask me.
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