Some days the answer arrives before you finish reading. Other days you burn all three strikes and still have no idea. That variance is deliberate, and it is probably the single most argued-about decision in any daily game.
Every case in the bank carries a difficulty rating.
A 1 is a story so thoroughly absorbed into public memory that naming it is nearly reflex - if you have been alive and near a screen, you know it. A 7 is a deep cut: fully documented, entirely verifiable, and requiring that you were actually paying attention at the time or have unusually broad recall.
The middle is where most of the bank sits, and where the game is at its best: hard enough that the answer is not automatic, fair enough that the clues genuinely get you there.
This distinction matters more than anything else here. A hard case is not one about someone you have never heard of. Almost every subject in the bank is extremely famous - the difficulty comes from which event is being described, and how it is framed.
A 7 is usually a very famous person and a genuinely surprising documented fact about them. That is a fair puzzle: everything you need is retrievable, and the reveal teaches you something.
A case about someone nobody has heard of is not difficult, it is unanswerable, and it is not a puzzle - it is a trivia question with no route in. Those get cut regardless of how good the story is.
The intuitive design is a gentle upward ramp - easy at the start of the week, brutal by Sunday. We deliberately do not do that, for two reasons.
The first is that a predictable ramp is solvable meta-knowledge. If Monday is always easy, you stop reading Monday carefully. Any pattern in difficulty gets learned, and once learned it replaces actual deduction with scheduling.
The second is retention. A daily game needs new players to survive their first week, and a new player who lands on a scheduled 7 concludes the game is not for them and never returns. Mixing means whichever day someone arrives, they have a decent chance of a satisfying first result.
The cost of mixing is exactly the complaint you would expect: two hard days in a row feel unfair. They are not personalised, and they are not a difficulty spike aimed at you - it is just what a shuffled deck looks like from inside.
When a case closes, the game shows what share of players solved it, drawn from anonymous results. That number is worth trusting more than your own sense of a day's difficulty, because difficulty is heavily dependent on which decade of pop culture you happened to be paying attention to.
A case that felt trivial to you and was solved by 20% of players was not easy. You just happened to be the right person for it.
Cases about documented good behaviour rather than scandal skew hard, and not because the subjects are obscure. They are hard because the frame - redacted name, newsprint styling - primes everyone to guess someone with a bad reputation. The reflex does the damage.
These are among the most-missed cases in the bank, and the pattern of wrong guesses above them is the most interesting thing the game produces.
Check the solve percentage on the results screen. If it is low, it genuinely was hard and you are in good company. If it is high, you were the wrong person for that particular slice of pop culture, which happens to everyone and is not a verdict on anything.
Either way there is a new one at midnight, and the Morgue has the full documented story behind every closed case - which is the part worth reading even on the days you lose.