A Story to Die For

" Well, I can certainly testify for your excellence as an editor. And as you know, I'm not that easy to please."

"Murder, She Wrote: The Classic Murder"

Yes, I have been playing relatively many DS games this year...

Earlier this year, I wrote a little about the Izumi Jiken File ("Izumi Case Files") series developed by G-Mode. It is one of the few mystery adventure game series which was originally created for Japanese feature phones. Some might not know about feature phones, but before smartphones took over the world, there was an interesting market for Japan-exclusive 3G feature phones (garakei) in the early 2000s, with many games developed exclusively for feature phones. These games could only be purchased and downloaded on a feature phone via the network provider, and only worked on those models. Smart phones eventually replaced these feature phones and these old feature phones and their services aren't supported anymore, but feature phones were the standard for over a decade in Japan and they provided a unique gaming environment at the time. Due to the shift to smart phones, a lot of feature phone games have become lost media. G-Mode has been re-releasing a lot of old feature phone games on Switch and Steam for the last two, three years however, which is how I got to play the first Izumi Jiken File, which was a popular detective game series back in the early days of feature phone games. How popular, you ask? Well, the series had been downloaded over a million times, so that means quite a lot of people have played these games!

Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File ("A DS Mystery for Adults - The Izumi Case Files" 2007) was one of those rare times a feature phone IP made the jump from a feature phone to a dedicated gaming handheld system, which probably is also a sign of how popular the series was. This release on the Nintendo DS consists of six different scenarios/episodes, three of them being ports of the first three entries released previously on feature phones, and three episodes being completely original and exclusive to the DS. Overall though, all these episodes take on the same format and basic story: you play as as Izumi, editor of the famous and immensely popular mystery novelist Kyougetsu Masamune, who has one little problem. Kyougetsu gets distracted extremely easily and this always happens right before a deadline. Kyougetsu usually likes to stay somewhere else as he gets through crunch time,but for some reason he always happens to run into mysterious cases of death and he always gets very distracted by that, for he always suspects it is murder, but due to the deadlines, he can't concentrate on either the murder or his manuscript. And that always leads to our heroine Izumi being forced to investigate the case herself, interview all witnesses and suspects again to come up with her own conclusion, which allows her to compare notes with Kyougetsu and of course ultimately conforming Kyougetsu's suspicions of murder, all just so he will finally finish his book. Most of the time, the episodes are set in a tourist destination outside Tokyo, like Kamakura, Tottori and Hokkaido, allowing the games to show off a little bit of the locale.

As a mystery game, Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File is extremely short and limited in scope, but while it is hardly a high point in the mystery library of the Nintendo DS, it is strangely enough also one of the mystery adventure games on the system that is the most truly puzzle-oriented and which really challenge you to carefully look at all the puzzle pieces to figure out who did it. But because the format originates from feature phones, the scope is very small. And that is actually one of the reasons why the series was so popular on feature phones in the first place. For especially in the early days of feature phones, phones didn't have that much free storage space, and more importantly, data costs were of course far more expensive than they are now. Because of that, story-based games for feature phones (like the popular Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney ports) often had to be split up in parts: you had to download a part, play that, and then delete the previous part to download the next part again. The Izumi Case Files games on the other hand were especially designed as light-weight games: each episode was just one single download app, and presented the player with a complete mystery story. That does mean each episode can be played through in just about 30-45 minutes the first time through, but that was close to the norm back then on the system. 

The three feature phone original episodes, and two of the three DS-original episodes follow the exact same three- act format, with limited gameplay, but fairly focused on the puzzle. Each of these episodes has Izumi look into a suspicious death, ranging from a man found one morning frozen on a bench on the "lowest mountain in Japan" to a hobby fisherman who have fallen drunk into the sea near Kamakura. In the first act, you just get the short introduction with Izumi looking for Kyougetsu and him telling about whatever case is bothering him now. In the second act, Izumi examines the scene of the incident and afterwards, she interviews all the suspects and witnesses The witness tells you about what they saw and did before the discovery of the murder and may provide you with one extra bit of information about one of the other suspects. Rinse and repeat for about five suspects, and at that point, you are basically done. For in the final act, you can directly go to Kyougetsu, who will ask you a few questions about the murder to test how much you have learned. Kyougetsu however doesn't really say whether you are answering his questions correctly or not until you have answered all his questions, meaning blindly guessing won't get you far (as you aren't told how many/which of the 5-8 questions asked you got right).

Interestingly however, these games only ask you about your conclusions, but there is no actual gameplay mechanic to represent the puzzle/solving element of the mystery. You are only given the testimonies of the suspects in the second cat and you then have to piece the thing together yourself either in your mind or on paper before you choose to continue with the third act. The puzzle format is a very focused whodunnit puzzle and at times can be tricky for something that is actually very simple in design: basically, you are always trying to make a timeline based on the testimonies of the suspects, checking who saw who at what time, and of course cross-referencing them with the other testimonies. If done right, you'll eventually realize one character must be lying, or at least intentionally withholding information, and that usually leads to the truth. Sometimes, you have also have to figure parts of the howdunnit, and in rare cases, the whodunnit aspect will only allow you to eliminate a few suspects initially, and the case has one extra act to give you that one extra clue that allows you to identify the culprit. To be honest, the really tricky part of the whodunnit puzzle is exactly there's no in-game mechanic to easily compare testimonies, which kinda forces you to put things down on paper or go through the testimonies one by one carefully, for ultimately it's just a "check whose testimony creates a contradiction" puzzle, but on the other hand, you could say this is a fairly pure whodunnit puzzle, of the likes you don't actually often see in mystery adventure games. It fits the simple hardware capabilities of the original feature phones of course, and I did enjoy playing with the testimony puzzle pieces, but every episode basically plays and feels the same because the story in each episode is pretty 'rigid', with next to no real story developments throughout and all witnesses only having one single story to tell you.

One interesting, but flawed addition this DS collection has over the original feature phone entries however is the episode "Wedge Sole", which plays completely differently from the other episodes and is probably even longer than all other five episodes combined on a first playthrough. It's a kind of open world mystery game with ambitious ideas, but not very rewarding execution. This episode is set in Tokyo, on the last day of the year and continues into the first day of the new year. You can play as two characters: Izumi and Masumi, a college student who is a recurring character in the series, and are able to "zap" between the two protagonists at will. The episode also introduces the concepts of "time" and "money": moving from one location to another takes time, and using public transport, or purchasing objects or spending time in a cafe costs money. Once you start the episode, you are basically free to go wherever you want, and you can find various "quests" across Tokyo. For example, if you can find Kyougetsu as Izumi, he will tell you about a mysterious death that has been on his mind, and then you can travel across Tokyo to find the suspects and hear their testimonies and finally report back to Kyougetsu. But you have to locate the suspects yourself, and some persons may only appear at a location at a certain time, so you have to be careful about the time, and how much money you spend on the train. But in the meantime, you might also stumble upon other quests too, like Izumi running into an old friend who seems to have something on her mind, or Masumi getting involved in a kidnapping. 

I like the idea of having a multi-quest mystery adventure game, and the time/money system reminds me of Tantei Shinshi DASH!, which was actually also a very flawed game even if the concept could be fun. But Wedge Sole just has too many minor inconveniences. For example, while you can take on several quests simultaneously, you can only finish one, as the episode ends whenever a quest is ended, so that kinda defeats the idea of being able to take on multiple quests. A quest usually only adds about 10~20 percent to the overall completion percentage, meaning you have to play this episode quite a few times. The map is also extremely cumbersome to navigate: it basically only shows you the Yamanote train line, but sometimes you actually have to transfer to the subway to arrive at a certain location, but that is not indicated on the map, so you just must happen to know what in real-life, you're supposed to change from the train to the subway at a certain station. That of course doesn't really work well with the limited money/time, because you already have to be careful about your actions and then give you a map that isn't really helpful. Ultimately, I didn't really like Wedge Sole even if it was an ambitious experiment to do something else with this series.

The games feature photo-realistic backgrounds and the characters are designed in a realistic manner too by the way, but there's basically no animation, and the games all look incredibly plain. While the three episodes that originate from the feature phones are now all available on the Nintendo Switch too, I have to say they play a lot better on the DS due to this DS version being a proper port. The Nintendo Switch versions are, intentionaly, faithful ports of the feature phone versions, which mean their screen sizes are also as they were on feature phones. This results in very narrow screen on your television or Switch screen, with gigantic black bars on both sides. This DS game however has the graphics properly adjusted for the DS screen, so you can read everything perfectly fine. 

Otona no DS Mystery - Izumi Jiken File is by no means a must-have if you're into mystery adventure games on the Nintendo DS, and yet, it was a game I wanted to play for a long time because it was based on a feature phone mystery franchise, and that fact alone made me really curious. While the main series is now being ported to the Switch, I am still glad I decided to pick this release up due to the DS-exclusive cases, and having found a new copy that was actually pretty cheap. While I think the focus on a whodunnit puzzle is pretty interesting and something you don't often see in mystery video games, there's no denying these games are just very limited in scope, so it's hard to recommend them to people unless you're really into DS adventures. Still, the Switch ports of the feature phone games are on sale every few months, so it might be worth looking those up if you're into this very short, but interesting period in the history of Japanese mystery media.

Original Japanese title(s): 『大人のDSミステリー  いづみ事件ファイル』

Weave a Tangled Web

" Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."

"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

You may have noticed the new tab at the top of the page mentioning Higurashi: When They Cry. Yes, I have started my visit to Hinamizawa recently and am currently playing Higurashi: When They Cry. Like last year, when I was playing Umineko: When They Cry, I'll be keeping notes there about each seperate chapter while I try to figure out what's happening in Hinamizawa, jotting down the questions and suspicions I have after finishing each chapter. Obviously, there'll be spoilers for the various chapters, so you probably should only look if you're familiar with the franchise. I'm going in mostly blind by the way (not even seen the various anime adaptations) so no spoilers please! Note that I am playing the Switch version though, which is a bit different than the more popular PC version, also following a different order. I'll probably be going through the game slowly, so I'll try to mention it in the regular posts too whenever there's an update.

Anyway, as I'm writing about mystery games anyway, I figured I might as well write a short short on some mystery games I played recently, especially the games that were fun, but not really deep enough to write a whole post about, so perfect to just throw on one heap and discuss briefly together.

Last year, I wrote a short article on the Kibukawa Ryousuke series, a series of mystery games which were originally released on feature phones in Japan. Due to the collective jump to smartphones, a lot of feature phone games are now lost media, but luckily, publisher G-Mode has been releasing ports of feature phone games on the Switch (and occasionally Steam) for over a year now, saving these games from obscurity. The Kibukawa Ryousuke series was perhaps the biggest feature phone-original series, spanning nearly two dozen of games. G-Mode has been publishing these at a fairly steady rate and I still plan to write a larger post about the series in general in the future, because while not every single release is as interesting as others, I think there are some entries that are worth highlighting.

Another feature phone game series that had always interested me was Izumi Case Files, developed by G-Mode and at one time popular enough to even warrant a DS release. The series ran from 2002-2009 and in it you play as Izumi, editor of the famous mystery novelist Kyougetsu Masamune, who often gets involved in murder cases, forcing Izumi to solve the murders to get Kyougetsu back to work again. One characteristic of this series was that each game would play out at a different (touristic) location, and that the team would actually travel to do research on the location (despite the limited budget!). G-Mode recently ported the first volume Shiosai to the Switch, and it's a very limited, but promising series. These games were originally released for feature phones (with limited storage space), and unlike some feature phones, these games did not work with a subscription model, where they'd cut a game up in different parts which you could download seperately each time you finished the previous one. Izumi Jiken File: Shiosai Hen (2002) was just a single download app, and an early one too, so it's really, really small in scope and you'll be done within forty minutes. In this first episode, Izumi is informed by Kyougetsu that he's distracted by a murder he heard about while visiting the harbor town of Shiosai in Kanagawa and that he thinks he knows who did it. Izumi has to investigate the murder herself to confirm Kyougetsu's suspicions and thus she's off to the harbor, where a man waiting for a fishing buddy was found murdered on one of the docks in the early morning.

 

The game is very simple: you just talk with all the suspects, have a look at the various locations and then it's the finale already: talk with Kyougetsu, who will ask you a few questions to see if you know who did it and point out how you came to that conclusiom. This is done by pointing out some contradictions between the various testimonies you got, and that part of the puzzle is okay, even if a bit simple in design. After answering Kyougetsu's questions, he'll say whether you were right or not, and then give you the option of whether to rethink your answers, or just continue on with the game, as Kyougetsu will explain the case and the clues anyway. Very simple game, made for simpler times for simpler machines, but I do like the realistic tone of the game and as feature phones evolved and more storage space became available, I assume these games also developed, become greater in scope (something very noticable with the Kibukawa Ryousuke series), so it's a game that is not a recommendation on its own, but it certainly is worth keeping an eye on this.

In Kitfox Games' Lucifer Within Us (2020), the player takes up the role of Sister Ada, an excorcist of the Church of Ain Soph. The deity Ain Soph is believed to have banished Lucifer and his horde of deaemons to the Aether a century ago, allowing for the world to flourish and develop into the high-tech world it is now, where cybernetic enhancements to the bodya re normal and sophisticated machines are powered by the Aether. Murder too has been a sin forgotten in this world, at least, that is until the start of this game, because Ada is asked to investigate a mysterious death, which may actually be the first murder committed in over a century. However, the only way a murder could happen in this world, is if a Daemon has managed to escaped the Aether and corrupted a person into committing the murder, so Ada's task is not only to solve the mysterious death, but to also identify which of Lucifer's minions have made their way back to the human world to corrupt mankind again.

Lucifer Within Us is a very interesting mystery game, that builds on familiar mechanics, but blended into a very original and promising game... that unfortunately is also way too short to really make the best of its amusing gameplay ideas. The game throws you right into a case from the beginning, where you're introduced with the core mechanic: timelines. Each suspect you interrogate will give an account of what they were doing around the time of the murder, which is reflected on a timeline, which you can play like a video, with the timeline divided into smaller segments to indicate the precise action they were doing at a specific time. However, as you listen to more and more suspects, you'll notice that their claims sometimes contradict each other: Suspect A for example may say they saw Suspect B picking up the murder weapon at 01:00, while Suspect B's story has them relaxing behind their desk at that times. By pointing out these contradictions between stories, you can force suspects to change their stories and tell you what they were really doing. The idea of allowing players to pick out contradictions was of course introduced by the Ace Attorney series, but has since seen various implementations. The idea seen in Lucifer Within Us is similar to what the demo of Armchair Detective did too, allowing you point out contradictions between various suspect testimonies, though Lucifer Within Us's presentation is very different, showing an isometric 3D world where you can actually see each testimony playing out on the screen, with characters moving around the map and telling you what they were doing and what they saw. Each time you point out an inconsistency in a suspect's story, you also gain an opportunity to peek into their "sanctum" (psyche), scanning their mind for markers and traits that might indicate certain Daemons.  By checking a compendium on Daemons, you can identify what Deamon is behind the murder. Eventually, the goal is to match up the various timelines and identify who the murderer is, when the crime was committed, the weapon and the motive, ultimately leading into the identification of the Deamon that has corrupted the mind of the culprit.

Seeing the different testimonies play out on your screen is interesting, and the way the game has you compare the various accounts to find contradictions is fun, making these investigative puzzle parts the highlight of the game, but ultimately, Lucifer Within Us is just far too short to really make an impression. The game offers three cases, which all take about an hour or so, but it feels like too little is done with the concept. The first case barely differs from the the last in terms of difficulty or clever plotting/hidden contradictions and the overall story the game tries to tell feels rushed, with surprise plot twists not feeling as such in any way because the player has barely been settled into the world and characters. The small scale of the game is perhaps best represented by the idea of the Daemon compendium: the idea of having to identify a corrupting Daemon is fun, but there are like only 4 or 5 Deamons in that thing! The game tries to sell itself as a game twice, thrice as big, but it isn't, making it feel a bit underwhelming by the time you're done, which is a shame, because I do think the core ideas work well, it's just the execution doesn't macht the potential of the ideas. 

Last one today is Inkle Studio's Overboard! (2021), a simple but very fun inverted mystery game. Set in the 1930s on board of the SS Hoook you play as Veronica Villensey, who has just thrown her husband overboard in the night, and with some hours left until the ship will arrive in New York, it's up to you to erase all traces of your crime and get away scot-free. Each action you take in the game will take a certain amount of time, and the other passengers and the crew on the SS Hook all have their own schedules to. People you meet might ask you about your husband, and others might even have heard something suspicious last night, but it's up to you to deal with any problems that might pop up and make sure your stories to the various unique characters match as the ship approaches its destination.

One of the most unique licensed detective games was Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo - Hoshimitou - Kanashimi no Fukushuuki, based on the Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo series. But in that game, you didn't get to play as the series protagonist, but as a murderer, who has to plan and commit their murders, without getting caught by the series' hero! This was a very memorable game, and there never has been anything similar to that game, until the release of Overboard!. That said, Overboard! is more limited in scale. Your first two playthroughs make take about thirty minutes or so, but afterwards you'll start to realize what you have to do and manage to speed-read through most of the game. As this is an inverted mystery, the "mystery" of this game is of course the question: how are you going to get away with murder? Each action you take, from visiting the deck to having lunch or chatting with fellow passengers about what they may have heard last night will take a certain amount of time. The clock will keep on ticking, and each character has their own schedule, so sometimes you might find that a character you want to speak to isn't available at that moment, because they are napping. 

The first playthrough, it's likely the passengers will notice your husband has disappeared from the ship and ultimately realize that you killed your husband. But no problem! You are supposed to play through the game multiple times to learn the best and most efficient way to get away with murder. That character who heard you throwing your husband from the ship last night? Perhaps this time, you can convince them that what they heard was something else. That piece of evidence you dropped on the deck? The second time, you'd better get there early to pick it up yourself. With each subsequent playthrough, you'll identify what problems lie on your path to freedom (the mysteries), and through trial and error, you'll find the correct actions (and the time to do them!) that will solve those problems (the solutions). It's a simple game that will take just a few hours to get through, but the presentation is really good (as is the voice acting), and it's a short, but memorable experience. Especially enjoyable I think for those who don't usually play games, as this is very easy in terms of mechanics and controls.

Three very different games, which basically only have in common that they are all relatively short. Of these three titles, I think Overboard! that has made the best of its potential, as it does appear to get the most out of the idea without overstaying its welcome. Lucifer Within Us feels like it has the potential of becoming something much greater, and feeling too short at this moment, while  Izumi Jiken File: Shiosai Hen might have very harsh hardware limitations, but that doesn't take away the fact it's really, really short. Oh well, what isn't short is Higurashi: When They Cry, and I'll be busy with that for the coming months, though hopefully I'll be (mostly) done by the time The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story will be released, because I'm really looking forward to that new game by one of the writers of 428 and the director of Trick X Logic! Anyway, if people here want to share something about these games or about some interesting mystery games they have played lately, comments are always welcome!

Original Japanese title(s): 『いづみ事件ファイル Vol 1: 潮騒編』