I love mystery games, as you may have noticed if you've spent any time reading here. My introduction to visual novels was the Ace Attorney series and since then I've enjoyed titles such as Danganronpa, Raging Loop, and Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happinesss. I also enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, which if it hadn't been in 3D may as well have been a visual novel. Getting to the bottom of a crime-laden mystery is something I enjoy.
But when I heard that even if Tempest had trials where you use evidence to ferret out the culprit, I assumed it would be a half-baked mechanic, mostly because it's otome. Perhaps that's an unfair assessment, that media aimed at women would phone it in, but most otome games that come to the US are visual novels and if there is any gameplay beyond making choices, it's a relatively easy activity so the player doesn't get frustrated when the main point of the game is playing out a romance.
Both Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly and Collar x Malice require the player to shoot a gun sometimes, but one is extremely forgiving and the other is more of a matter of having good timing than good aim. As someone with notoriously bad shooter skills, those examples were not a downside for me, but being a mystery lover, a half-assed murder trial would garner a sigh of boredom at best and ruin my immersion at worst.
I needn't have worried.
After I finished my first high tension witch trial, during which I was afraid I'd screwed up so badly my protagonist Anastasia was going to be burned at the stake, I was actually discombobulated to come to the next scene and be greeted by Anastasia's love interest. In the midst of all the investigation, sussing people out, and going through my evidence list at the trial itself I'd somehow forgotten which genre of game I was playing.
After the initial surprise, I realized that this is a game that feels particularly geared towards me. I like Anastasia as a heroine. She's willing to do the years of hard work to forge herself into the person she wants to be. She plans ahead. She knows the object of her revenge and how to expose him, and she is willing to do whatever it takes to save the person closest to being family that she has.
So when Anastasia needs to bring down the Witch of Ruin as part of the bargain for her friend's life and her revenge, she barrels into the witch trial like hell on wheels.
Which is to say, she's a lot more action oriented than most otome protagonists, and clearly takes the lead in the investigations, even if her current man is tagging along. This makes her work well as the protagonist for a mystery game and she's just as motivated as the player to get these murders solved.
And from a game mechanics perspective, I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, which also allow the player to visit a variety of locations, there is a limited amount of time to hunt down clues, which prevents the player from starting the trial with a full suite of information. You have a set of suspects marked by the Witch of Ruin, but only one of them has been turned into the witch's plaything, and I was given 11 hours until the trial began (appropriately at midnight). Each avenue of investigation had a time cost associated with it, so I wouldn't be able to follow all of them before the trial began, which as a mystery game veteran was rather unsettling.
It's okay to proceed without all the clues? I can't have all the clues? What madness is this?
And then the trial itself isn't really about establishing evidence or pointing out the flaws in another person's logic, though that can help. The witch trial is decided in the court of public opinion so even if you're completely correct, it won't mean anything if Anastasia is pissing off the 300 jurors so much that they're unwilling to believe her.
Though I don't think the trials are as freeform as they initially appear, I found I loved the format. Knowing that the right answer might not actually exist in my evidence because I didn't do that investigation added an edge to the presentation, and presenting the wrong answer usually doesn't result in the player being thrown back to the evidence list until they find the right answer. Instead, most of the time the game will acknowledge you chose poorly and the trial will move on, with failure being the result of multiple decisions over the course of the trial rather than a failing to present an obscure piece of evidence five times in a row at a single point in time. (I do like Ace Attorney but I don't like feeling obligated to save right before presenting evidence because I don't know which item out of twenty is the one I need.)
The trial even has decision points where you can choose to focus the debate around a particular person, and there is more than one option that will satisfactorily end the trial with the correct culprit being identified. As long as Anastasia does enough to shift the blame where she wants it to go (because it's court of public opinion), it's a win.
There are only two things that bothered me. The first is that when the game transitions to the evidence list, it doesn't let you back up and read the last line of dialogue regarding what you are trying to prove or disprove. Since most of the time the penalty is just a reputation hit and the trial moves on, it's not horrible, but being able to read the last line of dialogue lets you compare the evidence to what was just said and that's not possible here. Most other games with a trial system will let you do this. Worse, on the rare occasion you really have to pick a specific piece of evidence before the game will move on, you might find yourself stabbing in the dark for your second or third picks because you can't remember what you're supporting or disproving.
The second issue is that I think it's actually possible to hose yourself going into the witch trial on Zenn's route. (And spoilers ahead for the rest of this paragraph and the next.) I often went into witch trials with missing pieces of evidence, so I didn't think anything of it when I entered the Zenn route trial with the intention to falsely convict Crius of being the Membrum. But the problem was, I got far enough that Anatasia was ready for the killing blow that would "prove" his guilt and I didn't have anything. I kept trying one thing after another and none of my evidence seemed to be working. After about five tries using increasingly absurd pieces of evidence (eiT is not as obtuse as AA can be) and taking constant reputation hits, I finally gave up and loaded an older save.
I think there are only two ways to falsely convict Crius, either by revealing that he knew the first victim, or providing a motivation for killing the second. There are only four investigation leads at this point in the game, and the player has time for three, so in theory there's no way the player can leave without at least one piece of evidence to earn a conviction unless they purposely stop investigating early, but it's possible to do one of the investigations and not get the evidence based on a dialogue choice, which is what I'd done. I don't mind not having all the evidence necessary for a perfect trial, but having to restart the game from an earlier point in time because I can't finish the trial at all shouldn't happen.
End spoilers.
When the witch trials came to an end, there was still more story to go, but I realized I was a little sad that it was not likely many fans of mystery games (who aren't also part of otome fandom) would bother to play this game. The non-linear trial system that accepts multiple answers and provides multiple investigation routes without losing the thread of the story is quite frankly an amazing experience and I hope to see something like it again in another game. Unfortunately, with even if Tempest being an otome and the story wrapping up so witch trials will no longer happen, this is not a case where we would expect a sequel with those mechanics back in action, and Voltage, the publisher and developer, has never developed anything outside of otome so it's unlikely this mechanic would return in an unrelated title.
If you're interested in a game that will give you three solid trials and a pretty engrossing mystery that sometimes has romantic overtones, then I absolutely recommend this. It's a novel spin on the investigation and trial system.
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