Murder by Numbers is a visual novel styled detective/mystery game, that uses Picross puzzles as its method of gameplay. The story premise starts simple, the main protagonist is a detective-playing actress that gets herself involved in a murder case, after meeting SCOUT, a robot with visual recognition functions, that has mysteriously awoken with his memories lost, they team up together to solve the many incidents they somehow end up getting involved in, taking a mantle of a wannabe detective duo while trying to learn more about the past of SCOUT.

The gameplay options are simple and concise. When the situation allows for it you can move through different locations relevant to the current chapter, question people and present evidence to them to get information or reactions. Additionally, you can scan the locations for any suspicious looking spots, here is where the Picross tie in happens, to scan for items, you'll have to solve Picross puzzles that will reveal evidence that may help the ongoing investigation.

That is the simple explanation of the game, though I have a few comments about it. Firstly, besides the puzzles you'll encounter through the chapters, there are some extra set of puzzles on the "SCOUT's Memories" section. The way these are unlocked are by reaching different "Rankings" on each chapter, earning points as you complete puzzles. The thing is that if you happen to use hints during a chapter, you will miss out on bonus points, which from my experience of using only a few hints in Chapter 1, will not allow you to get the S rank and unlock all bonus puzzles for that chapter. Forcing you to replay the chapter and beat all the puzzles without using hints if you want to unlock them.

This previous realization was annoying as they don't tell you this prior to experiencing it on your own, so it lead to being careful on the remaining chapters and use save scumming if I needed a clue on a puzzle, so that I could clear them "without hints" and get all bonus points. Even IF you do this, there are a few missable puzzles that can cause this frustration if you progress the story too fast in some situations. Another slight con is that there's no way to replay the puzzles found in the chapters unless you replay them completely, possibly a "Gallery" where you could access them would have been a good addition.

Besides these minor gripes the game was very enjoyable, most cases were interesting and engaging, and it wraps up nicely for the few lingering questions that arise through the story. If you're doing the puzzles on your own then most of the playtime will be spent in them, the story on the surface is not incredibly long, but by the end it's interesting enough with its theme and characters.

The picross is fun, but not enough on its own to warrant full price imo. No variants or anything, just plain picross. If you like picross *and* visual novels, then this is definitely worth considering. Also seems to work well with nintendo button layout controllers without any tweaking, so thats nice.