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Finch & Archie Earns a PAX Aus Showcase Spot With Co-op Where the Dog Knows Things the Detective Doesn't
Archie can smell evidence that Jack Finch cannot detect. Finch can interrogate a suspect in ways Archie obviously cannot. Neither character receives the complete investigation, which is exactly where Finch & Archie wants two players to start talking.
By Nolind Finch & Archie 
Finch & Archie has been selected as one of the six digital winners of the PAX Aus 2026 Indie Showcase. Octarine Arts will exhibit it in Melbourne from October 9 through 11.
The game itself launched into Steam Early Access on January 16.
The asymmetry starts with perception
Jack Finch approaches a crime scene like a conventional detective. He can examine suspicious details with his magnifying glass, collect evidence and question people connected to the case.
Archie gets a different information layer. The newly graduated police dog follows scents and discovers leads his human partner cannot simply inspect.
Octarine Arts designed the pair around what it has described as two ways of seeing the same world. That distinction is more useful than merely giving each character a different animation set: the investigation itself is divided between them.
Finding evidence is only half the problem
A scent discovered by Archie does not magically make Finch understand what happened.
The developers deliberately restrict how the characters communicate. Archie cannot speak English and Finch is not fluent in barking, so players need to find ways of conveying character-specific information to each other.
That is a clever complication for online co-op. External voice chat normally makes secret information trivial to share. Finch & Archie instead puts some of the friction inside what the characters are capable of expressing.
Suspects can be pushed into contradictions
Evidence eventually feeds into interrogation. Players question motives and alibis, compare statements and use collected clues to expose contradictions.
An accusation board is used to assemble the resulting case. Octarine Arts has already changed parts of that system during Early Access: a February update made individual accusation sentences validate separately rather than treating the whole board as one all-or-nothing answer.
Steam Cloud saves, invite and join functionality and further UI adjustments have also been added since launch.
The partnership is supposed to improve with the players
The mechanical split reflects the story. Finch begins as a detective who has sworn off canine partners after losing his previous one. Archie is assigned to him anyway.
Octarine Arts has said their relationship becomes closer as the episodes progress, while the people controlling them should also become better at interpreting each other's behaviour and information.
The current Early Access storyline follows the pair through criminal cases while a larger investigation into a serial killer known as The Jackal develops in the background.
Episode 2 is the next major step
The studio said during the summer that Episode 2 was approaching completion, with playtesting, gameplay-sequence adjustments, environmental polish and cutscene work underway. Planning for Episode 3 had already started.
Octarine Arts is a six-person studio founded in Perth in 2023. Finch & Archie is its first title and has received support from Screenwest and Screen Australia.
Its next public stop is PAX Aus in October.