Solid game. I like picross puzzles. The story is a little nonsensical at times, playing into more modern tropes like "female lead happens to be better investigator than old white guy with 30 years on the force". Act three was my least favorite, not because of the scenario or the characters involved, but it was a little too on the nose with its leaning into feeling like it had to "educate" the player on pronouns and sexual identity. No thank you. Still, overall I enjoyed. For the price it is now especially, you're guaranteed a lot of good hours. There are four cases, and the last one does get a little long in the tooth, with the last third of it seeming to be longer than the first two cases combined. All in all, it's a decent VN combined with puzzle games to advance the story. I got it free via EPIC, and it's one of the first games I've played to completion via their platform since I've been collecting free games from them for the last three+ years. It's also playable through GeForce Now, but the specs are super low for it. Takes up maybe 1 gig of space. Even if you absolutely don't care for the story, the puzzles are pretty good and quite challenging in places.

Murder By Numbers feels like a great start to a franchise that combines picross gameplay and murder mystery. The cast of supporting characters are fun and interesting, the main duo have great chemistry with each other, and are apart of the center of this games mystery. The music and art style emulates the likes of Phoenix Wright and for good reason as a lot of the game is either inspired or in the musics case, made by the same composer. The is a total of 4 cases, with each case being longer than the last, and providing a different unique mystery.While I certainly think the game is a great starting point, it also has a lot to work on as well. The majority of the game doesn't feel heavy enough on mystery, with a lot of the game focused more on character interactions and picross than solving a mystery. A lot of the villains are also either too predictable, uninteresting, or both. And there was never a moment where I actually cared about any given villain, and the little that I did was mitigated by how little they did after the fact. The Ace Attorney series have a way of making their villains far more nefarious or remember-able by giving them more outlandish features or motivation, but the majority of Murder By Numbers villains are far too grounded in reality. If anything, Murder By Numbers needs to work on their reveals more in order to wow an audience.I certainly like picross, and even learned how to do it better thanks to the games tutorials and mechanics, I feel that it relied far to heavy on the gameplay from it to use it effectively, and didn't quite iron out a way to make non-picross players stay. A good way to help that is either to beef up the hint system or simply lower the overall difficulty of the puzzles. Largely the fact you're scored throughout the case, and get penalized if you use hints makes a lot of the game harder than it needs to be. And while I understand the process of using a high score system to influence players to play, the fact that in order to S rank on a case, you have to either 100% the first time or go back and redo it again makes for getting any of the unlockables more of a frustrating endeavor than it needed to be.Overall Murder By Numbers is a game series that I want to see more of and while it does have it's problems, they are far more minimal than I make them out to be. The majority of this game is a great start to what it can be, and the fact that I can see that potential, keeps me excited for this game.

A visual novel with a few easy nonogram puzzles here and there. The story is super simple and silly. You can never belive that a police department inspector misses so many easy clues that a simple actress can find. There's like 10min of avoidable text in between every playable/puzzle section. So the game is more about reading than about playing.