Recent reviews by chrysalis83

Boy, the internet failed me here. This is hailed by many as one of the GOAT VNs. This isn't the worst VN I've ever read, but it's DEFINITELY in the bottom third. I read 80% of it (on switch- my pc hours are not relevant) and then looked up the rest of the plot because I could tell this was going nowhere that interested me in the slightest.

Now, one man's trash is another man's treasure, so I'll tell you what I typically like in a VN- I want twists, a good bit of mystery, plenty of world-building, all anchored by well-defined, likable characters. Umineko, Fate/Stay Night, Ace Attorney, Centennial Case are all favorites.

If you have similar tastes, you might want to reconsider a purchase. Gothic romance is really what's on offer here, and despite reviews to the contrary, I didn't find the story particularly original or interesting. I didn't even really like the character by the time I stop, which is a BIG problem. I got as far as I did still wondering when things would pick up.

One of the biggest problems is the prose. Conversations go on forever without actually being interesting or building out the world well. For a 30 hour VN, astonishingly little happens. I just do not understand comments to the contrary.

Also, the handful of twists are way over-telegraphed. I was *never* surprised.

The OST is...fine. Probably the best part of the package.

I just really don't get the accolades. Just saying- you might not either.

Square Enix is really hitting it out of the park with low-mid budget games. Last year, they released The Centennial Case, an interactive detective visual novel/TV show with a terrific story, memorable soundtrack and shocking twists. It was my 2022 GOTY.And now, about a year later, they've released Paranormasight, another modestly-budgeted visual novel. Again, it has an amazing soundtrack. Again, the story is really good. Instead of being a formal Agatha-Christie type mystery affair, the theming veers more towards horror, but the mystery chops are still pretty strong. The character designs are amazing, and the whole thing will just draw you in- it's the most compelling game I've played in...well...a year.If I'm going to knock the game anywhere, it's that there's no voice-acting, but in truth, it works well with the horror vibe of the game. After a while I didn't miss it.And that's really all I want to say, because this is precisely the type of game where you're better of going in knowing nothing. Do you like mystery visual novels with light horror elements and original puzzles? Buy it. Don't read professional reviews- they just can't help themselves with spoiling stuff. I read one review after finishing the game, and they all but completely spoil the most innovative puzzle in the game. So just do it. Buy it. You're HIGHLY unlikely to regret your decision.

Got play-for-8 hours-look-up-and-realize-it's-3am hooked on this today. Quite dangerous. The detractors are right that there is some RNG as you unlock new elements. The occasional run feels a bit doomed to fail. However, there's plenty of strategy and ways of mitigating the hand you've been dealt. I'm really enjoying learning the ins and outs of this- a REALLY solid board-gamey puzzle tower defense rogue-lite thing. Almost beat the first island (level 39!!!)- but at least I unlocked the second island and another faction.

So this has David Wallace from the Office. And that's the nicest thing I can say about the game.

First, the mystery itself is pretty obvious. I was pretty sure who'd done it an hour or so in.

Second, I guess the game is supposed to be funny, but I mostly found it annoying. The dialogue wasn't particularly clever, and I've never seen a crueler cast of people. Again, that kind of thing can work if the writing is good enough, but it's mostly not. You're subjecting yourself to a grating family reunion...

Multiple times. Because, of course, the premise is that you play through multiple times and watch the permutations of different videos based on your choices. The changes in what happens based on your choices feel really random, so you really will be just grinding through the choices and rewatching a lot of videos.

Even though the devs have implemented a skip feature, it really isn't comprehensive enough. You're still rewatching lots of scenes because of VERY minor, nonconsequential changes based on your choices.

Even then, the game is all of 4 hours long. I've accused everybody (the endings have a couple of surprises even when you know whodunnit) and collected all but 1 or 2 clues and, yeah- 4 hours. Not terrible, but you're not getting a ton of value here.

Finally, *slight spoiler even though I recommend staying far away from the game*, the correct ending removes any respect I had for the main character (although the tone suggests I'm supposed to support her).

So yeah...pass....even on a sale. If you really want a good FMV mystery game, go play Centennial Case!

It boggles my mind that this has a "mostly positive" rating as of May 24th. This is the kind of mystery game that we get once in a never. If you're a fan of Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, 428, 999/VLR, etc. you can safely stop here and add to cart- even for the steep-ish price. ~16 hours of mystery goodness with some wild twists. IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't miss out on the epilogue that appears at the very bottom of the menu after the credits roll. It's the true end of the game.

Centennial Case feels very much like an interactive season of a murder mystery tv show. There's got to be 10 hours of live-action footage here at least, not counting wrong answers/bad ends. The acting is pretty good if a bit hammy in places, but the writing and atmosphere will fully pull you in. The soundtrack, by Yuki Hayashi- known for My Hero Academia among other things- is fantastic and really amps up dramatic moments in the story. I'll be listening to it on its won.

The structure is similar to AA/Danganronpa. There are 4-5 cases (depending on how you count them) with a big underlying mystery running through all of them and a big-ass explosion of reveals at the end. The individual cases are well-written and generally surprising in one aspect or another. I, an experienced armchair detective (as pretentious as that sounds), rarely had a full mystery figured out even if I saw through some tricks.

What's also interesting is how the game equips and engages the player with the clues. After watching "the show" for each case, the player is taken to a deduction board of sorts. There's a pattern matching game that takes place here where the player matches clues tiles up to mysteries tiles by the way the borders of the mystery match the borders of the clue. This is the weakest aspect of the game, BUT it's really just a device to force the player to consider the clues. Each match that is made will generate a hypothesis about some aspect of the case. The player should then be think about which hypotheses fit well with other hypotheses and point the way to the true solution.

Once this deduction section is complete, we go to the traditional "gathering of the suspects" where the detective explains the solution. But at critical points in the explanation, the game asks the player to answer important questions about how the crime was committed and who did it. It works really well, as the deduction board section does a really good job of preparing the player without necessarily making them feel like they've fully solved the case. The questions asked are usually narrow enough to guide the player gently towards the solution while still allowing them to fail.

What's also cool is how well the game tracks all the information you acquire. At any time, maps relevants to the case, names and relations of character, clues and hypotheses created, and more are available in a slick interface. There's even a timeline that gets updated over the course of the game with a couple of cool surprises.

As mentioned above, everything culminates in a series of reveals that I didn't see coming. I won't say more than that.

But ultimately, this is an easy contender for my game of the year. It's amazing that it got made, it's amazing that it was localized, and I fear that, given the minimal marketing, we will never see its like again. Highly recommended.

Here we go again. Frogwares, you've given me Stockholm Syndrome or something. SH: Crimes and Punishments is, hands down, one of the best detective games ever made- possibly THE best western-developed detective game. The cases were all clever, handed you the clues to solve the case, but trusted you in manipulating fairly complex mind palace boards and deducing which of the possible solutions actually best fit the evidence at hand.

Then came Devil's Daughter. The cases weren't as complex, with additional mini-games and QTEs cluttering up the game and a useless overarching story that did not allow much deduction from the player.

Then, Sinking City added a whole bunch of extra investigation mechanics. Problem is, they lacked depth. Searching through archives wasn't entirely new, but now you had to travel to a different part of the city to do it. Finding locations you needed to travel to was as simple as opening up the map and finding the right intersections. Sequencing crime scenes was a lazy way of imparting information the developers could not communicate otherwise and certainly didn't trust the player to figure out. The open world was empty, ugly, and largely pointless. And to top it all off, the mind palaces were even less complex than before and were more focused on moral choices than deduction (at least as far as I played- I bailed around halfway through).

Enter Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One. The early previews/pr pointed to this game being a return to form despite the continued inclusion of the open world. The mind palaces were supposed to be back with a vengeance.

Alas, shockingly, this game has betrayed any hopes I had for improvement. I'm through 3 of 5 main cases (with one of them being an overarching story that I'm also partway through). The first case was decent- not up to C&P standards, but it wouldn't have been amiss in Devil's Daughter. But the second case? Entirely ambiguous. It's a mess. The clues point equally to multiple suspects. You can't even check whether you correctly picked the right perpetrator like you could in C&P. Case 3 has been even worse. There's no deduction to make at the end. You know everything about whodunnit just by following clues. The decision is 100% moral like much of Sinking City. What comes across in the latter two cases is how much more interested the game/devs are in talking about current social issues than they are about delivering a clever mystery. I'm just bamboozled that they went in this direction. Seems that this is only the Frogwares that made Crimes and Punishments in a very Ship of Theseus sort of way.

And then there's all of the worthless side content. I've "solved ~ 10 of the side cases so far. As another review mentioned- the sidequests are basically less enjoyable versions of Witcher 3 detective vision. The plots are simple (with an exception or two), there are no mind palaces and no interesting decisions to make.

Some of the "cases" simply amount to going after collectibles or shooting up warehouses, which WOW...the combat is hilarious. I feel like I'm ranting, but hot damn, this game provides plenty of fuel for the fire. The shooting mechanics are some of the most mind-bogglingly strange bits of gaming I've encountered ever. You encounter enemies wearing hats, shoulder pads, or explosive jars across their backs. Shooting these things either staggers them or gives you the opening to throw snuff in their face so you can incapacitate them. Why is shooting shoulder pads necessary to allow me to throw snuff in someone's face? Why are people wearing shoulder pads for protection but little else? Are the devs tapping into some alternative version of Victorian times where soldiers wore explosives on their backs?

The really inexplicable bit is that critics harped on how much combat sucked in Sinking City. And instead of responding by saying, "hey, let's stick to our strong suit, investigation," clearly, someone ignored the criticism and bulldozed ahead.

Anyway...I'm going to finish this travesty in the low hopes that one of the latter two cases are stronger, but I'm not holding my breath. And I certainly won't be buying the next Sherlock game unless I hear some stellar stuff from people I trust. No more day 1 for me.

Agatha Christie is my jam. I grew up watching Poirot on TV and was so obsessed that I composed an arrangement for the theme song in middle school. Later, I read every mystery novel Christie ever wrote. So a Poirot game comes out with an original plot not covered by one of the novels? I do not expect much (without the writing of Christie herself), but I perk up nonetheless. A chance to exercise the gray cells, perhaps.

Alas, this is a case where I'm torn between thumbs up and down- really, it's a straight up meh.

I confess, it's really difficult to create a good mystery game. You want to empower the player to investigate on their own, allow them to figure things out, not insult the intelligence of people who are good at solving mysteries while putting in (optional) player assistance tools to help those who are not. Really, it's not easy.

Perhaps the most promising non-visual novel approaches to the problem have been Frogwares more recent Sherlock Holmes games. Crimes and Punishments, in particular, included a memory palace interface that allowed you to combine clues in different ways and arrive at different conclusions. It was up to the player to decide which combinations of clues actually made the best sense of all of the evidence. Best of all, the player could be WRONG.

HP: The First Cases seems to have taken some inspiration from C&P by incorporating a similar memory-palace-esque network of clues to be assembled, but the system works differently. You draw connections between a much larger number of nodes, but once you've made a connection, that connection is permanent, immutable truth. The gameplay is less about solving the case and more about figuring out which connections you're supposed to make. If you make the right connections, the case solves itself.

There are a couple of problems with this:

- When the game is telling you there are two connections to make and there are 20-30 nodes, trying to find the right connection can be quite difficult. What makes things worse is that some potential connections seem perfectly natural but aren't what the game wants you to connect at that moment. Other connections feel like real leaps, with very little reason for the player to guess that the game wants them to pick these two points. The game tries to solve this by implementing a hint system that highlights the relevant nodes once 2-3 wrong answers have been made, but it feels like the game is just handing you the (too obtuse) answer.
- What's everybody's favorite part of a Hercule Poirot book? The gathering of the suspects as Poirot builds up to the reveal of whodunnit, right!? Well, here, there's no big reveal. As above, the grid solves the case for you as long as you make the right connections or let the game more or less do it for you. *slight spoilers* the actual gathering of the suspects scene is one of the most boring and anticlimactic cutscenes I've seen in a while.

Ultimately, it makes for a pretty deflating mystery.

Other minor demerits:

- The game spends an awful lot of time on moralizing. That's all well and good unless you've actual read an Agatha Christie book. They largely focus on the puzzle of the mystery and then quickly end once that bit has been resolved. This seemed more like it wanted to delve (breezily) into social commentary a la Gosford Park. Poirot spends an lot of time lecturing people on right and wrong, which he really doesn't do much in the books. He has a moral compass to be sure, but on the page, his primary activity is that of detecting. My playtime took in the range of 10 hours- maybe the devs felt they needed to pad the play time out.

- Super linear gameplay. At not time are you free to explore the manor as a whole where the case(s) take place. Each chapter limits you to 3-4 rooms and doesn't let you go other places (even rooms you've already been to). So instead of feeling like you're getting to investigate on your own, you get the feeling instead of being shunted along the exact path you're supposed to follow.

On the plus side: the voice acting is pretty convincing and the story largely kept me compelled.

So...I enjoyed the game enough to finish it in a couple of evenings, but the investigative systems were weak enough and the gameflow linear enough that the finished product might have been better served as a visual novel, tv movie, or something of that ilk.

I can't put into words how amazingly over-the-top this game is. I don't think we'll see the likes of it again, from the looks of the trailer for the reboot. The humor and ridiculousness are something that no other videogame has tried. The first 30 minutes alone are permanently etched into my brain (in a good way!) On top of that, it also happens to be the best Matrix videogame ever made as well as one of the best superhero games ever made. I will never understand the folks who prefer the more grounded style of the earlier games- like, you could just go play GTA. SR4....I'm gonna say it...is a modern day masterpiece.

Finally tried with the free weekend, and it earned a purchase from me. Essentially, there seems to be a fair amount of content now, the characters are fun to play, and the story is pretty good. I like Kamala Khan more than I expected to.

ONE NOTE: The first 10-15 minutes of the game are easily the worst. We start off controlling a kid version of Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) who proceeds to fangirl over everything in sight in a very annoying, cloying way. This gets less common after that, and the rest of her background and character gets a chance to shine.

I'm enjoying the inklings I'm seeing a of different builds for each character as I unlock abilities for characters- from an RPG standpoint, the game does a good job of giving the characters their signature powers while allowing players to specialize.

The only down note for me is the soundtrack. The Avengers movies have a strong musical identity. I know the game wants to create its own universe, but they at least should have hired someone to create some unique and compelling melodies. Most of what I've heard so far is low key digital beats in the background. It's a big missed opportunity, but maybe that will be rectified in the dlc I've yet to play?

Anyway, this is clearly a different game than it was at launch, and I keep finding myself wanting to play more- give it a go!

This has scratched the Slay the Spire/Monster Train itch well for me, although, at 70 hours, I think I might be done for now.

Pros:
-Good music- probably not quite as memorable as the best of the other two giants in the genre, but it's quite close.
-Fun combos and interesting enemies- essentially, the core gameplay is really solid.
-Explorable map- adding a sort of HOMM layer to the game in lieu of a node map makes progression a little more open-ended and has been enjoyable.
-New game+ - much like ascension levels in STS, there are higher difficulties that add extra limitations to how you play. Here, however, you can mix and match from several different categories, and some of the effects are quite fun to play with, changing especially how you interact with the overworld.
-Devs also seem really engaged and committed to balance.

Cons:
-There's a good amount of content, but it needs an expansion or two to feel as varied as Monster Train
-It's missing a few feature that are common to this genre (like run history) and some of the achievements don't seem to track perfectly yet.

Neither here nor there: I really enjoyed the level of characterization that the artwork + voicework gives each of the characters. This genre tends to have very little lore, but I found myself wanting to know a bit more about these characters.

Overall, very worth the money- here's hoping for more even content in the future!