- Game: Mediatonic's Murder by Numbers
- Release Month: March.
- Quick Look: N/A.
- Started: 5/12.
- Completed: 8/12.
My first serious Go! Go! GOTY! contender for the GOTY list, if not the top spot, Murder by Numbers by Mediatonic is a delightful merger of picross puzzle games and a '90s-set detective procedural visual novel made in a Japanese style, specifically modelled after the likes of the Ace Attorney franchise, or possibly the Hotel Dusk duology. Disclaimer: due to it being something of the home of picross these days, I bought the Switch version of Murder by Numbers, though after learning my lesson from Picross 3D Round 2 I relied purely on the controller for filling in the grid rather than the undocked touchscreen controls.
The story of Murder by Numbers sees down-on-her-luck Hollywood actress Honor Mizrahi encounter an amnesiac robot named SCOUT, and a shocking murder at her former workplace eventually highlights both her latent talent for deduction and SCOUT's invaluable capacity for scanning and analyzing important clues and evidence. Most of this process involves SCOUT examining the local vicinity for items that might be relevant to the investigation, each of which leads to (of course) a separate picross puzzle. On the picross side of the equation, the game has a brief tutorial that explains the basics of the interface and of the "overlapping" technique - determining correct squares based on whether or not they're active whether you start the row on the left or right, a fundamental component of solving picross puzzles - before letting you loose and slowly building its way up to 15x15 grids (there is exactly one 20x15 grid, and only in the "bonus puzzles" section of the game, which makes me wonder why there weren't more). Something that occurred to me close to the end of the game is how miraculous it was that they were able to create a constant difficulty curve for the picross puzzles while building investigative stories around the objects you were finding; something I'm sure wasn't easy to pull off, at least not without some trial and error to redraw those pixel objects several times over until they made for an appropriately challenging puzzle for that specific stage of the game.
Due to its nature as a hybrid, and perhaps the developers' inexperience with either half of Murder by Numbers's make-up, there's a few fixtures common to visual novels and picross puzzles alike which aren't present here, though they are admittedly minor conveniences and the kinds of exclusion you'd only notice if you've played a lot of games from either genre. As an example on the picross side, there's a feature common to picross games where you can mark boxes rather than cross them out (to indicate there's definitely not a square there) or fill them in (to indicate there definitely is a square there) if you need a visual aid to plot possible solutions. Murder by Numbers has them too, but if you try to delete them en masse - by dragging the cursor across the whole row or column - it also deletes all the valid crosses/fills as well, which shouldn't happen. Once you've correctly (at least, by your estimation) filled in a row and can delete the no-longer-necessary guide markings by holding down the deletion button and working your way across the row, most picross games will only remove the markings if that's where you started. It's a very minor thing, but still makes guide markings less convenient to use. Likewise, as a visual novel, Murder by Numbers lacks any kind of "log" feature: an ability to see previous lines of dialogue if you clicked past them too fast. That's more than possible due to the way that Murder by Numbers, when dealing with situations where one character interrupts another, will have the first character's dialogue box interrupted in real-time without the player needing to hit the button to proceed to the next line. This makes it both annoyingly easy to miss the end of the interrupted dialogue, and easy to accidentally skip the interrupter's dialogue as you click the "next dialogue" button the moment it pops up unexpectedly. This is distinct from visual novels which will generally indicate an interruption with an en-dash at the end of the first dialogue box, but still hangs on it until the player is ready to read on. Again, it's worth reiterating that these faults don't drag the game down much at all and that developers that create picross games (like Jupiter) or visual novels (like 5pb.) have been working in those spheres since forever, and are often geared towards making nothing but them: to expect the same level of expert proficiency from a novice developer looking to create something distinct and breezily fun isn't all that fair, but I'm pointing it out anyway because I'm always cranky in December I guess.
Murder by Numbers is also part of a small but growing movement in the Indie scene towards stronger LGBTQ+ representation in games, dovetailing the anecdotes of drag queens and Honor's best friend and flamboyantly out hairdresser K.C. with SCOUT's own voyage of self-discovery, including his confusion over whether or not he has a gender identity as a robot. It's all wholesome and cute and feels intended to introduce audiences to these worlds in much the same way the Ace Attorney games took steps to explain the more obtuse inner-workings of, say, filming TV shows or spirit channeling to its frequently bemused Judge character. The writing in Murder by Numbers is uniformly excellent for that matter, even if the whodunnit aspect can feel a little too perfunctory; it's amazing how quickly Honor can put together a solid explanation of the culprit and how they did it after SCOUT identifies half a dozen random objects sitting around the crime scene. The writing and themes are also much more, well, I might say "mature" compared to Ace Attorney - which I only keep bringing up because Murder by Numbers is so obviously riffing on it (to the extent that it brings in original AA and Ghost Trick composer Masakazu Sugimori for the music) - in how it covers difficult or nuanced topics, in particular the slimy, manipulative way that Honor's ex-husband tries to worm his way back into her life after closely controlling it for most of their marriage. That isn't to say Murder by Numbers doesn't also ably balance its more serious moments - a whooooole lot of dead bodies - with plenty of levity too, especially with SCOUT's terrible puns and Honor's half-baked explanations to her over-protective cop associate for why she put herself in harm's way again. I enjoyed it all, even if much of it only exists to get you to the next picross puzzle. Speaking of which, anyone worried there wouldn't be enough picross puzzles in a game splitting its focus between it and adventure gaming needn't be worried: not only is the story replete with puzzles everywhere you turn, but there's a whole bonus section dedicated to about 70 extra puzzles that exist irrespective of the main story progression. If I complete a picross game and don't want to see another picross for at least three months, then I'm satisfied it had enough of them - that was definitely the case for Murder by Numbers.
Overall, I think Murder by Numbers is probably too small, too niche, and arrived too early in the year for it to see any serious GOTY consideration (not that Mediatonic will mind too much: they also made Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout this year, which has something of a higher profile), but I consider it a very effective blend of two disparate genre bases that's really only missing one additional coat of polish. If you're a fan of both stated genres, or a fan of one who is curious about the other and looking for a good entry-level gateway, then this game should serve you well.
GOTY Verdict: Absolutely worthy. Hovering around the middle of my list at the present, though might eventually get bumped off the top ten once I've caught up with more of 2020's bigger games in years to come.
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