• Murder by Numbers
  

  34 hours playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

i got into this one because i like picross / nonogram puzzles and someone said it had an interesting story too. the mouse controls for doing the puzzles felt great, but the puzzles themselves don’t really look like anything to the extent that you finish a puzzle and wonder how it’s going to color it and what it’s going to call it. the free crossme app on my phone has puzzles that i can recognize as i finish them, though sometimes that means i can cheat a little and fill in squares based on what makes sense. each puzzle is on a grid with rows and columns in multiples of 5, and they get larger as you progress through the game.

the puzzles are the part that take the most time (especially toward the end), and there’s no way to save a partial puzzle if you run out of gaming time. there’s a design flaw in one of the four cases where you can miss one of the puzzles in the story meaning you can’t get S-rank without doing the entire case again and you also miss out on some of the scout’s memories puzzles. other minor annoyances were scanning rooms for puzzles being basically a pixel hunt and the character reaction sound effects.

still, solid puzzles even if the pictures you’re filling in don’t look like anything plus a story that kept my interest make me recommend this game.