I wouldn't recommend this even though I got it on a massive sale. At full price, it'd be just insulting. This is an investigation visual novel, but it's highly linear and without much user creativity or problem solving (unlike an Ace Attorney or Famicom Tantei Club).
There is an overarching story, but at any given moment, you're mostly working on smaller cases. I got a mildI wouldn't recommend this even though I got it on a massive sale. At full price, it'd be just insulting. This is an investigation visual novel, but it's highly linear and without much user creativity or problem solving (unlike an Ace Attorney or Famicom Tantei Club).
There is an overarching story, but at any given moment, you're mostly working on smaller cases. I got a mild enjoyment from solving these cases - there's about as much mystery as an episode of CSI, but that can still be fun. The big problem with the cases large and small is that none of them are satisfactorily resolved. The game has multiple endings, but doesn't give you any sense of which one you're progressing towards, until you suddenly hit the end and didn't learn anything. Allegedly, the ending is determined by the choices you made throughout the game, but a lot of these choices are pretty similar (things like "you knew my grandpa?"/"I'm here for my grandpa") and it was hard to tell what was impactful. I was really surprised that the choices changed whether I as a player ever resolved the meta-story, and I'd have to replay the game in order to get a different ending. Nor did I really find out what happened to the one-off cases I solved, either, other than finding the criminal.
If you play visual novels for the art, run screaming from this one. The backgrounds are just photos that have been rasterized, and not even decently modified (say, to remove random people in the background of the photos). They aren't even thoughtful photos - the "small town" backgrounds are obviously still in New York, with lots of high rises visible. But even more than that, the character art is atrocious. People appear as mostly static paper cut outs on top of the photorealistic backgrounds (which is especially weird when the game hasn't edited out REAL humans standing right behind their paper counterparts). Although you get full body figures, there's minimal animation other than faces, and the faces are deep in the uncanny valley. The game doesn't properly commit to a realistic or an anime aesthetic and ends up with anime eyes above creepy teeth-mouths. No thanks. The lack of animation and the eerie faces also meant that none of the emotional moments really connected; I think this game would have genuinely been better as a solely text-based game.
The music, on the other hand, is pretty decent. Yeah, it can be repetitive, but I actually remember the soundtrack after I put the game down. I can't say that for many games I played as an adult.
Overall, even if you're a viz nov nut or love investigation games, I wouldn't bother with this. Watch a few episodes of your favorite crime show instead. The redeeming qualities don't make it worth playing a game that doesn't resolve the mystery and has such off-putting art.… Expand