Murder by Numbers

A very unique game which reminds me of Phoenix Wright only insteadof just chatting and finding hints your hints are getting unlocked through a number game which is at first pretty easy to understand but its getting harder and harder and you will need to use in many puzzles a different way of thinking!

Picross meets visual novel. There is nothing wrong with game that makes you use your brain and it delivers in that regard. There are no twists or anything, just your regular picross. Any comparison of it to Ace Attorney is not only bad, but also wrong, it has nothing to do with AA series at all, other than being visual novel. There are no jokes, only this generation bad writing of "references" that plenty of times not only they don't make sense (like calling Streisand for reasons unkown even to the makers of the game), it's angry reviewing level of mediocrity. While difficulty for the most part goes up nicely through the progression of the cases, in the second and forth there are couple of puzzles that are insanely hard and based on guess work. You will get your money back easy if you like puzzle games - it will take you around 40 hours to finish with side content, so for sale price I can recommend it without a problem, full price feels like it's not worth it.

It was fun puzzle game not very hard to solve.

I like logic puzzle games, I've decided to try this one out, so I'd play it from time to time. I've got hooked immediately and sunk over 50 hours into it. I just couldn't stop until I've solved every puzzle available. It's also packed in a little visual novel story, that is really well made and funny, so the game wouldn't be so bare-boned. The entire gameplay consists of picross puzzles, so if you like this sort of thing, this one is really well made. It took me by surprise.

Interesting experiment, but falls flat. The nonograms half of the game doesn't mesh well with the visual novel half. The nonograms themselves are well crafted and fun to solve, but I found the visual novel aspect utterly boring. To me, this game lacks the charming characters and interesting plots of its inspiration, the Ace Attorney games (Murder by Numbers even shares the same music composer).

Solid puzzle game with visual novel storyline, vaguely entertaining storyline but I think they overdid the puzzling element a bit because it started to get in the way of the story. Still, I enjoyed it, it just drug out longer than I thought it should.

Some people will not like the gameplay but fans of Picross will love this, quirky storyline and interesting character, if you like picross, this is a great game to pick up.

It has a great story, well developed characters, a reasonable amount of humor, and a killer soundtrack that evokes highly positive emotions. Plus, you get a considerable amount of playtime in there. You do need to enjoy picross to enjoy the game however, as half that playtime might end up being picross puzzles. And sadly, it is just basic picross from start to finish. There could have easily been additional mechanics introduced along the way. I think one major issue is with the investigation aspect. I think it would have been so much nicer if it jived with the Phoenix Wright theme just like the rest of the game does. The problem is the camera just zooms in too much, bathes the screen in monochrome and cannot even scroll to every spot. You can't see the scene well, and the items you are looking for don't correspond to actual items in the scene, which makes the investigation gameplay meaningless. I get that the idea is to discover the item by doing the picross puzzle, but its not like we can really figure out the object from the puzzle anyway. Its fine to know what the item is, and then have the picross examine the item further, maybe revealing finer details not immediately visible.