Murder by Numbers Reviews

This is hovering on the edge between Recommend and Don't Recommend imo, but at the end of the day it's a solid Picross puzzler and I liked it enough to finish it. - Certain critical UI elements disappear on the Steam Deck when using the D-pad. Bringing up the "Show Evidence" button requires a tap on the touch screen. - Everyone needed at least one more talk sprite, and it would have been nice if the main characters had 2-3 more. - The plots for each case somehow got worse as the game went on. The first and second cases were (relatively) compelling and actually felt grounded in the world of the game, the third case was interesting mostly for [spoiler]actually making the drag queen the killer, even if it was an accident[/spoiler], and the fourth case was basically nothing and should have been split into two different cases. - Locking bonus puzzles behind completing every puzzle sucks when there's no way to skip through completed cases to find unfinished puzzles. There's one SUPER missable puzzle in Case 3 (you have to go back to an area that you don't have any reason to go back to - this is the only time you'd ever want to do that). Thankfully it's not hard to edit your save data to get an S rank, but you shouldn't have to.

It's been some time since I finished this. What I remember is that it is a fun game, with gorgeous art, and nice but quite overwhelmming story, it bothered me then how it doesn't have the basics of a visual novel, which is the skip button and also I cannot how the main character did not changed her clothes the entire game, which led for some moments that took me out of the narrative.

the art is really lovely! i enjoy the puzzles quite a bit too. most of the characters are really interesting and full of depth so i greatly enjoyed the missions. also the music is fantastic! i think the plot of the game is compelling enough to want to play through the end. i didnt find the mystery behind the cases to be too obvious or too obscure, and i was interested enough to want to go through to the end. my tastes are a bit simple tho there are parts of the game where you dont feel like you get much of a break between the puzzles and cutscenes, so do pace yourself! the timed hacking challenges are a bit annoying imo but i'm familiar enough with 5x5 patterns to quickly go through them, but i can understand someone feeling stressed out by them (especially the last one) i actually unlocked all of scout's memories (still working on clearing them at the time of writing this review) on the first try in each chapter, but i know it's a pain to have to go back and search for everything if you accidentally miss something...that would be incredibly frustrating. might be a good idea to add checkpoints or areas where you can load directly from, or just use all the slots and layer your saves the controls mostly work well! i'd love it if you could use your directional keys or wasd to move the camera when youre investigating. i dislike only using the mouse to scan around the scenery. i think this is the biggest change i'd love to see implemented in the game. otherwise i recommend playing the game!