Mohism: Battle of Words Reviews

A detective visual novel set in fantasy medieval China (wuxia style). The game is a visual novel with minimal animations. Backgrounds and characters are drawn as watercolor paintings with thick lines. This style works well with wuxia setting. The music is inspired by traditional styles. Voice-over is limited to primary story dialogues. Gameplay is similar to Ace Attorney - a visual novel with crime scene exploration, dialogues and deductions. The centerpieces of gameplay are the word battles, a more streamlined take on cross-examination from AA-series with time-limit. There is a difficulty setting that can decrease the time pressure. The game is mostly linear except 2 major choices at the end of prologue and the end of the game. These affect the conclusion of the story. The story fits into the wuxia genre with different political/martial arts sects and intrigue after accession of new Ming dynasty. The main character assists with investigations of murders and there is a background plot that connects them to a different degree. It was enjoyable and interesting and not as over-the-top as AA series. The localization is a mixed bag. The game starts in Chinese and must be switched to English in its menu (settings are the second choice on the main screen). Translations are generally legible and fairly good, with some exceptions. These may slightly complicate some deductions. English text formatting has a weird word wrapping, which is probably caused by engine made for chinese characters, but it is readable with no problems.

As someone that loves detective games ala the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa series, as well as Wuxia films. this game proved the perfect combination! I loved every bit of this game... my only complaint is that the ending felt a bit short, I feel like one more case would have been perfect. I would love more games like this set in pre-modern China. I also loved the music, although there aren't too many tracks, so i'm sure some people could complain that it is too repetitive for their liking. I played this on Linux via Proton. I experienced some minor glitches. I found that that the game would crash randomly sometimes, but by chance when I played it without a network connection one time, I found it worked perfectly and I completed the game. Hence despite my 0.8h on record, I probably put in somewhere around 12-15h. I would definitely recommend this for everyone that likes detective games, wuxia, and graphic novels, although I wouldn't know how many people there are out there where this venn diagram intersects!