Murder by Numbers

This game is a series of puzzles with a thin veneer of a game wrapped over it. If you like the puzzle type, there are a lot (hours and hours), and the difficulty is clearly well-curated to give a nice progression. It could use some interface improvements. There is no way to make notes or undo a series of clicks, and it took me forever to find the clear-all button, although it does exist (it's in the main menu, not on screen with the puzzle...for some reason). There is no way to save puzzles in progress, and if there is a way to back out of a puzzle, I haven't found it yet. You have to click to advance lines most of the time, except when you don't, and this can make you miss dialogue. There is no way to scroll back. It is possible to miss finding some item by accidentally finding a plot item first and lock yourself out of seeing the robot's memories, which are the reward for the best score. There are a few timed puzzles which I could barely pass which have no difficulty options that I could find; your ability to pass these is dependent on how fast you are with a mouse. The story is really, really silly. It's got 90s fashion (sortof; no one actually dressed like this), catty in-fighting, random robot sidekicks, drag queens, and grumpy mentors. The sound effects are extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, annoying. There are some very, very light adventure elements (apply inventory item to person to hear new dialogue), and there is no branching story. It's not a terrible story, but if the thing that interests you about this game is the theme, you are going to be disappointed. This "game" is an unlockable puzzle book.

The good: The puzzles are mostly straight forward (only had to guess on 3 due to sparse areas), but still "hard" in that they take thought and effort to finish. Plenty of them. The music is decent. Whatever: VN portion of the game is completely linear: bad choices result in dialog and reselection. It's just a wrapper for the puzzles. Some portions of this are pure busy work. I got the impression "solving crimes" was supposed to be part of the game, but it isn't. Is that a gun, or just a shocked expression? Over-the-top effects some times. Works on wine. The intro movie and exit without hanging require mf-install, but you don't really need either. The bad: Hacking. Complete 3-5 mini-puzzles quickly and without accidentally hitting a wrong spot. I was not able to complete any of them in one go. They don't affect your score (although they do block progress if you can't finish them). There is apparently no way to skip them. Probably OK if you have a touch screen. -2 points for hacking and lack of any meaningful detective work in a detective game.

This is Picross with a story. If you don't like Picross, or do not think you will like Picross, then do not buy this game. There is no other activity outside of these puzzles and you are hard blocked until you complete them. The game starts off with relatively easy puzzles, but after finishing the game, I spent probably half the game solving 15x15 puzzles. The plot of the story centers around Honor Mizrahi, an actor in L.A., whom at the beginning of the story gets wrapped up in a murder mystery as she is the prime suspect of her friend and producer that recently fired her from the show they've been working together. Along with a newly met flying robot, she attempts to "find" evidence to prove her innocence. It's easy to be empathetic towards Honor at first, she's hurt from being betrayed and she's alone since she's recently divorced from her psychologically abusive husband but quickly she abandons any reason and dives head first into every murder scene. It would have been interesting if this was thrill-seeking behavior from not having many close friends, but you find out that's not true. She jumps from mystery-to-mystery and scene-to-scene to move the plot along. Not because the character has any reason to do so. The game is not expensive, if you do enjoy Picross, it is easy to get your money's worth. But just don't expect the same level of quality of games like the Ace Attorney games. This was made on a budget. The characters are not animated, their stills just slide left to right to infer movement. The portraits are flipped around to denote the direction they face, which is extremely distracting when certain things like a police badge worn on one side suddenly flips to be worn on the other side when they face another direction. Overall, the game started with much promise. I did have a good time throughout most of it. By the end however, I really wanted to be done with it. I've solved enough Picross puzzles for, at least, a year.

Overall i liked Murder by numbers a lot. It has a similar humor and weird characters from the Phoenix Wright series but with Picross puzzles as the main gameplay component. There are no real gameplay puzzles or choices during the Visusal Novel part of the game, everything is on rails, if you are stuck just talk to everyone and show every item you have, untill the next part of the story unlock. But the story and characters are engaging enough that it doesn't really matter that much. The picross puzzles did get a little tedious in the later part of the last case, not because they where too hard, but because you have solved so many before, it would have been nice if there where some more variants to mix it up. As it is now it's just the regular ones and the time based "hacking" minigames where you have to solve 3 to 5 5x5 grids in a timelimit. It would also be nice if there where some more meningful choices during the plot. That said, if you don't like picross puzzles there is nothing for you in this game. It's the absolute majority of the gameplay and you will spend most of the time doing them.