Murder by Numbers

Picross games are something that I’ve always considered as a minimum “good 6-7/10” gameplay experience for me. I like Picross, I could do hundreds of Picross puzzles without complaint. Hell, recently, I’ve been playing the Picross NP series, a collection of Super Famicom Picross games released through Japanese Nintendo Power back in the late 90s. They’re an inherently enjoyable way to relax for me, and at times, even manage to surpass that into fantastic games of their own, such as the Picross 3D series. Unfortunately, if you’ve already looked at my score for this game, you’ll have seen that Murder by Numbers is a Picross game that is not, at minimum, a good 7/10. In fact, it feels like an awkward mix of two games–an okay visual novel and an okay selection of Picross puzzles–which is then further marred by such a complete lack of quality of life features, resulting in an overall mediocre package.

To give a brief introduction, Murder by Numbers intends to be a hybrid murder-mystery visual novel and Picross puzzle game. In gameplay, this results in an experience that seems closely influenced by the Ace Attorney or Professor Layton series of games–you complete puzzles that turn into images representing evidence and objects, and then you use that evidence to progress the investigation through dialogue with other characters. There’s a total of four cases, each with its own mystery to solve and ~20 puzzles to complete for each case. To best explain my issues with the game, it is easiest to split the experience into the two parts it’s built out of–the story-centric visual novel sections, and the gameplay-focused Picross sections.

Murder by Numbers comes across as a very clumsily written game. It features so many strange storylines involving murder, government conspiracies, killer robots, insurance fraud, more murder, sexism, believing in yourself, abusive relationships, even more murder, etc. that it’s easy to wonder exactly what the through-line of the narrative is meant to be. When the game took itself more slowly, I would occasionally come across small conversations I found enriched my experience of the characters and its world, such as lighthearted moments involving a wayward tampon in the first case, an engaging emotional story with the lead’s co-star in the second case, and some talks on gender identity between a drag queen and a silly robot in the third case. Unfortunately, a bulk of the dialogue involves dull, easy-to-solve mysteries and a lot of writing about the lead character’s personal feelings which always felt like the writer was trying to tell me what her themes were meant to be rather than showing them through conversations between characters. By the time one of the major emotional plotlines involving the lead character’s previous marriage was resolved out of nowhere in case 3 and is promptly forgotten about, my attention started to waver, and the absolute mess of the fourth and final case’s plotline certainly did not manage to bring me back.

The story of Murder by Numbers isn’t great, but I don’t think that’s too surprising–this is a type of game I would expect to put a focus on its gameplay and puzzles first and foremost… which is why I feel like it’s a shame that I don’t think much attention was paid to this side of the game. When you’re not reading dialogue, the main gameplay consists of moving through different locations and using an “investigation” option to find items you can use as evidence or to spark dialogue with other characters–after you solve a Picross puzzle, of course. This investigation section is one of the game’s worst parts–unlike in Ace Attorney where you’re generally encouraged to find specific things you notice in the area, the backgrounds don’t actually have the items you’re trying to find, meaning you’re meant to scroll across the entire screen waiting for a red indicator to start glowing red. It’s incredibly tedious, and mostly just feels like a failed implementation of that very system from the AA games. Once you get into the puzzles themselves, any experienced Picross player is going to quickly realize how bare-bones they are. Aside from two puzzles, the maximum size of picross puzzles in the game is 15x15, and these puzzles involve no added mechanics from other games, such as Mega Picross. There is a small subset of “hacking” puzzles which involve 5x5 puzzles where you cannot use “x”s and have a time limit to complete them, but these go by quickly and provide no real challenge. This adds up for a total of 200 “easy-to-medium difficulty” puzzles if you do all the bonus ones–I’ll admit, even as a big Picross fan, I started to get bored of the puzzles by the end of the game. This isn’t an issue of too many puzzles (for instance, Picross 3D: Round 2 has ~350+), but rather a complete lack of added difficulty or new mechanics. It feels like a huge dump of time-wasting, simple puzzles without much thought put into them, which is even more exhausting when the game continues to push and pull the player from dialogue to puzzles for a disjointed gameplay experience.

For a bit of housecleaning before I get to my final section on some of the game’s biggest issues, here are a few somewhat unrelated topics! The character designs are all rather good, though the expressions often feel rather limited in terms of emotions–for instance, the main character’s “sad” expression looks so incredibly pained that it adds an odd tone to emotional scenes. On the other hand, the pixel art for completed puzzles looks really really awful, to the extent where it honestly feels like no artist touched them at all. They look like full-size images that were compressed down. Even when the game told me what an object was, there were times when I couldn’t see the object in the art itself. And finally: the music.. is nice! It’s got some chill songs. I liked it. It’s nothing too special but it’s good.

Alright, so basically everything from before now was the preamble, because now… I need to talk about some jank. Without the complete lack of quality of life in this game, I would probably be nice enough to give it a six out of ten, or hell, even a seven, but instead, I have this wonderful bullet-point list of issues I came across… while playing Murder by Numbers.
• Movement when doing Picross puzzles is very awkward–my cursor would often move faster or slower than I intended it to, and the cursor itself loops across the screen, something which is rather uncommon for the genre in my experience and took a while to get used to.
• It’s incredibly easy to accidentally mark off squares you’re not intending to mark off due to misread inputs. I have many, many videos of this, where a mark my cursor is nowhere near will appear or disappear for no particular reason. If I don’t manage to notice this early, I may continue to try solving the puzzle even after the game’s faulty controls had marked off a spot incorrectly, causing problems down the line.
• There is no puzzle reset button or ability to quit a puzzle after it starts. If you accidentally restart a puzzle you’ve already done you’re forced to complete it. I seriously cannot believe this one, there were multiple times where I started a bonus puzzle on accident and just had to complete it again for no reason, or when I felt like I wanted to restart a puzzle but couldn’t, instead having to manually remove my own marks. Like, seriously… no option to quit puzzles at all. You have to go back to the title screen, which doesn’t work for bonus puzzles since the game does not always autosave when completing them.
• Reading through dialogue is awkward for a multitude of reasons. It’s easy to accidentally skip dialogue because some lines “auto-skip” once they’re entirely on the screen to represent a character being cut off by the following line, which means if you click “a” to make dialogue full-length to read it easier, you may end up skipping entire lines by accident. It’s easy to accidentally loop dialogue because there’s no pause between the end of dialogue and the dialogue choice screen, meaning my instinct to click “a” right when dialogue pops up often ended up causing me to loop it instead. There’s no dialogue fast forward or skip button at all, meaning if you accidentally loop dialogue or choose to repeat a case, you have to click through it again. And finally, there is no backlog, meaning if you happen to accidentally skip dialogue you can’t loop… well, you can’t read it anymore! It’s gone!
• Some characters only react to some evidence in certain locations despite that not being something that should matter in those cases. I think this actually might have been a bug involving one character showing up in two locations in case 2 when no other character does this, though. Either way, it’s jank!
• To get an S rank on a case (which you need to unlock all bonus puzzles and get some bonus story content), you need to do every puzzle in the level, but some puzzles are missable (it may only be puzzles in case 3 but I’m not entirely sure). If you miss a puzzle, the only way to get the S rank is to do the whole case again, from the start, and since there’s no dialogue skipping option and no puzzle skipping option for puzzles you’ve already done… well, I’m sure you get how annoying that must be for someone who misses one easy to miss puzzle in a case and misses out on that S rank.
• Game has occasional visual bugs and glitches. It’s really not a big deal but it adds onto the jank, seeing visuals or cursors show up where they’re not supposed to.
• Constant screen flashing and shaking during conversations that can’t be turned off. Does this count as jank? It was extremely annoying, considering the game includes sound effect subtitles for accessibility, it’s a shame you can’t turn off the constant flashing for similar reasons.
• One of the main characters is a gay dude and I don’t even like him. How do you mess that up?
Honestly, there are probably some more I forgot about or didn’t think about. I’m not going back to find out!

Murder by Numbers is, obviously, a disappointing video game for me. I was pretty interested when I first saw trailers for it because it’s combining two things I enjoy (murder-mystery visual novels and Picross) into a complete package–but… well, it just doesn’t work. The two halves don’t flow together well, and they’re stitched together with copious amounts of jank and bugs. It’s not a bad game but… god, it’s just not good either. Hey, did you know this studio’s next game was Fall Guys? Like, what the hell? That’s so weird. Fall Guys. Huh!