VN Talk: Murder By Numbers

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Switch)
Release: 2020

A friend of mine gave me the heads up about this indie game by comparing it to the Ace Attorney series, and after I watched the adorable opening movie, I realized I had to buy it. It was a slice of Saturday morning cartoon nostalgia crossed with solving mysteries. I was sold.

And here's your obligatory spoiler warning for a game that is less than a year old, since I'll also be covering some general details about the final villain and the end of the game.

Murder By Numbers clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Ace Attorney, being on the lighter end of mystery games and using humorous sound effects to express someone's shock or dismay. Much of this narrative sunshine is also due to SCOUT, a well-meaning robot who doesn't quite understand human slang and behavior. Usually if the mood is getting low, you can count on SCOUT to either break it with an unintentionally funny line, or by offering a genuinely kind word of encouragement.

However, unlike the Ace Attorney games, Murder By Numbers was written for a western audience, which means that it doesn't need to dance around cultural references. Taking place in Los Angeles in what appears to be the mid-to-late 90s, this means that the cast is diverse, particularly on the LBGT spectrum. This is a game where a robot asks if the fact people are using the pronoun "he" with him means that he is a man. Our protagonist, Honor, is clearly a woman of color, and probably biracial given that she has a Jewish last name, Mizrahi, and her mother looks African American.

I dove into the game appreciating its quirky sense of humor and entertaining cast of characters, but that said, after I played for a while, I realized I wasn't loving the game as much as I wanted to.

While we have the usual colorful cast of characters we'd expect from an Ace Attorney-style game (especially one set in Hollywood) and the associated stretching of what is permissible behavior because of them, I found I didn't quite like some of the characters.

There's a lot about Honor that's appealing. Aside from being a woman of color, she's a divorcee with a strained relationship with her ex-husband, one that she would like to end permanently except that her mother keeps hoping they'll get back together and finds ways to include him. It's complicated and unhealthy, given that her ex used to gaslight her to keep control of the relationship, and that's something we rarely get to see a female protagonist deal with. Honor left that guy, is finding her place as a newly single woman, and gets to have her ex arrested for some shady stuff over the course of her amateur detective work.

I want to like her, so every time she jumps the gun on accusing someone it really hurts. If the game had been written so I was on board with the conclusion that would be one thing, but she's off running to the lead detective to call for someone's arrest while I know we don't have enough enough evidence yet. Not only does this bite her in the butt the first time it happens, but she keeps doing it later in the story. The first time could have been a forgivable case of newbie enthusiasm, but she doesn't learn.

And I'm a little conflicted about how her ex was handled. I'm fine with him being a vile human being, but until his arrest I wasn't exactly sure what level of danger he was to her or anyone else. Is he just a controlling ex, or he is a man capable of calling in a murder? There was a build-up during the second case where it was starting to look like he was involved in something deep, and eventually it looks like "all" he was up to was making Honor's career as an actress crash and burn as revenge for leaving him.

While normally that would be fine, I started suspecting him of being involved with the end of the storyline baddie (instead of just hiring one of their goons), but in the middle of the third case he's just arrested and off he disappears. It felt like solving the largest subplot with a third of the story to go! I was expecting him to hang around until the fourth case before being shuffled off camera.

I also want to talk about the pacing of the game. While this may not be an issue for some players, it's important to realize that this is a combination mystery/puzzle game, with most on the weight being on the puzzle. There are no courtroom trials in Murder By Numbers, so most of the gameplay comes in the form of puzzles called nonograms (also commonly referred to by gamers as Picross). You will do these puzzles every time Honor looks for something or if someone shows her something.

Usually I don't bring up gameplay mechanics, but in this case, the mechanics actually ruined my enjoyment of the story, and it didn't help that it's not possible to save in the middle of conversations like most other visual novel/detective games. Instead, you can only save in the middle of a puzzle or when Honor is allowed to choose her next action.

This caused me numerous late night moments of praying that I could just get to the next break point in the story and save without hitting a puzzle that will take me another 20 minutes to solve so I don't lose track of the conversation. It really sucks starting a conversation, getting a puzzle, realizing I have to stop and save, and then coming back the next day to finish the puzzle only to forget why I was doing the puzzle in the first place. Oftentimes the ending half of the conversation wouldn't give me the necessary context to remember what happened beforehand, so I'd be trying to put things together with vague memories of the case in general.

While the game has one of the better nonogram tutorials, I'm more of a casual dabbler than a hardcore nonogram puzzler, so it wasn't uncommon for me to spend most of an hour long play session on just two or three puzzles. The puzzles were fun at the start, but the further I got in, the more I found them to be hindrance, and while there is a hint option, doing that reduces your score, barring you from unlocking extra cut scenes, so if you're more of a story person than a puzzle person, you still have to do all the puzzles the hard way to get your story.

One of my friends joked about how the game was going to make me do a puzzle to find my keys, and with all due seriousness, you actually do that in the very first case of the game. (Though SCOUT doesn't get it right on the first try.)

The narrative conceit is that SCOUT is looking for clues, and doing the puzzle is him sifting through data to find things, but that doesn't explain why I need to do a puzzle to reveal a driver's license someone else is showing me.

The one thing that saves this game is SCOUT. Aside from being the biggest source of humor in the game, the meta story that runs through all the cases revolves around his origin, and because he's such a good kid we care about what happens to him.

Like the Ace Attorney series, there is a smaller story for each case, and an overarching story that runs through the entire game. However, Ace Attorney usually does a pretty good job making overarching story details relevant to the current plot when revealed in early cases, leading to "wow" moments when you realize that what looked like a minor detail early on is actually really important to a later case.

Murder By Numbers doesn't do this, since the overarching story elements tend to be tangentially or completely unrelated to individual case stories. SCOUT's existence doesn't have much to do with any of the cases, not even the one that kicks off the final case, but the narrative expectation is that somehow everything is being masterminded by the secret organization that created him (or at least that's what I was hoping after watching the opening movie) when that isn't the case at all.

I mean, the death at the end of the first case and the final villain are tied together, but it feels almost incidental since what the villain wants is so far removed from what his lackey was contracted to do by Honor's ex. It might feel a little unfair expecting the story to ape the same plot beats as Ace Attorney did, but it's clearly a setup the developer was going for when they hired the same soundtrack composer and they included the same audio cues that match the intonation of how a character is speaking. I ended up feeling like the individual cases didn't matter as much as they should have.

For example, by the time I finished with the last case, I realized that I had no idea how I got from the start of the case with a quirky movie director to arresting the head of a security firm, which was in no way related to the director's own crimes. The two characters never even meet.

Part of this was due to being burnt out on puzzles, so I ended up taking a two month break, but I've done that with other games and not had nearly the same amount of difficulty picking up the story again as I have with this one.

But if there was one plot thread that could pull me through, it was caring about SCOUT. I knew he'd been altered since his creation because someone wanted to turn him into a weapon, and then he was discarded when one of his team members was accidentally killed by him. So it was easy to root for a robot that just wants to be loved and not hurt the people he cares about.

Since the final villain is in direction opposition to all that, and was responsible for altering SCOUT in the first place, we care about defeating him not because of anything recent he's done, but because of what he did to SCOUT before the story even started, which is good because as a primary villain he leaves something to be desired.

Sure, Jack is menacing and he's got a gun, but his attitude and the dubious morality of his security firm are completely at odds with his high-minded claims that he's doing all of this to save lives by making weaponized robots to fight in place of people. It's not that he can't have that be his end goal, we have well-meaning extremist characters all the time, but I have trouble believing that a guy so quick to get his hands dirty is really interested in saving lives. I would've had an easier time believing he was trying to land a lucrative military contract for his end game.

Though the ending seems to tie everything off with a bow, with SCOUT's creator dead, all our criminals either dead or behind bars, and SCOUT officially declared destroyed so he can start over without his previous history, the post-credits includes a sequel stinger with the SCOUT prototype having gone missing, and that gave me mixed feelings.

I don't mind that it was included. The main story was complete and having a sequel hook for a potential second game in a series isn't a bad idea. But on the other hand, I don't know if I want to do a second go-around.

Because the gameplay/game design interfered with my enjoyment so much, I would need a couple things to play a sequel. 1) The ability to save whenever I want during the visual novel segments (so I can stop at a good breaking point in the story, and not the moment of a reveal, which is when the puzzle shows up). 2) Either fewer puzzles or no punishment for using hints when I want to speed up so I can finish my play session while I understand what's happening in the story. I'm here for the plot, and if taking hints means I'm barred from seeing all the story, then I won't use hints, and though I think Murder By Numbers has a lot of potential, I didn't love it enough to keep playing when I burned out on puzzling.

If you love nonograms for their own sake and you're fast at solving them, then you'll probably enjoy playing through a lot more than I did. But if you're just an Ace Attorney fan and not a nonogram one, you may want to try a few nonograms independently of the game first and decide whether you can stand doing multiple 15x15 nonograms in a row by the time you get to the later cases.