The Message in the Haunted Mansion

"Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch."

Genesis 6:14 (KJV)

This reminds me, I still haven't finished Another Code: R in Another Code: Recolllection... I am a bit torn about the remake of the first game: I like the visuals a lot and how they reworked the mansion, but I do miss the darker vibe of the original manor, as well as the more memorable (but hardware-restricted) puzzles. I liked the original R a lot too so I really should get back to Recollection soon...

Suzuki Rika is now best known for her writing work on games like the Another Code and Kyle Hyde series for Nintendo hardware, which she developed at Cing, the company she co-founded. However, before her jump to the consoles, she was best known as a game developer working on adventure games for the PC for developer Riverhillsoft. Her best known work from that period are probably the J.B. Harold games, as most of them she worked on, like Murder Club and Manhattan Requiem, have seen an English release. The other series she developed at Riverhillsoft is the 1920 series, which was later retitled the Toudou Ryuunosuke Detective Diaries series. As the title suggests, you take up the role of private detective Toudou Ryuunosuke in these games set in the 1920s and work on serial murder cases in settings you know from classic mystery fiction, like a country house or an ocean liner. Suzuki wrote and designed two games with Toudou: Kohakiiro no Yuigon (1988) and Ougon no Rashinban (1990), but afterwards, the series stopped. However, developer Althi acquired the rights to the series in the early 2000s and starting in 2003, they first release feature phone ports of the first two games, and then continued on releasing more games in this series (of course, by that time Suzuki Rika wasn't involved anymore in the development). These games were a moderate success on feature phones and later smartphones it appears, as they released nine full entries in the end!

While this series was mostly developed on feature phones in Japan, they did port two of them to the Nintendo DS at the time: Kohakuiro no Yuigon (the first game) got a port on the DS on 2008, and one year later, they released a port of Aen no Hakobune - Soumatei Renzoku Satsujin Jiken ("The Zinc Ark - The Serial Murder Case at the Souma Manor"), a game originally released in 2005 on phones. And let me tell you: this release is rare. These games are pretty niche on their own, but Aen no Hakobune in particular released in very small numbers, and you could only get it used in Japan for insane prices. The problem however that it was also the only way to play Aen no Hakobune this last decade: the feature phone and smartphone games have not been available for purchase for a decade, and the games themselves are also not supported anymore by modern firmware iterations, so you can't even run the games anymore even if you had purchased them in the past. Heck, I have the iOS versions of Kohakuiro no Yuigon (and D.C. Connection), and I can't even re-download them or access the store pages anymore unless I whip out an old iPhone! But Aen no Hakobune was one of the few mystery games on the DS I figured I wouldn't be able to play due to the insane prices and no other way to play it.

Until G-Mode started doing their ports of feature phones games a few years back, and in 2023, they actually got started on the Toudou Ryuunosuke series! Previously, I already reviewed Ougon no Rashinban, the Switch port of the feature phone port of the second game, and earlier this year, G-Mode released the feature phone port of Aen no Hakobune, so I finally got to play this unicorn of mystery adventure gaming for a normal price. While prices have dropped slightly on used DS copies, at one time I have seen them go for as much as fifty times more expensive than the port you can now buy on the Switch. Being a fan of mystery fiction can be expensive...

 

That said, it's not like Aen no Hakobune is a paragon of mystery adventure gaming: it is basically the exact same game like Kohaku no Yuigon, Ougon no Rashinban and the earlier J.B. Harold games. The game is set at the gloomy manor of the Souma family standing on the edge of a cliff. The men in the family have always studied medicine, and they are running a mental hospital attached directly to the manor. The story starts with Toudou being hired by Kimura Tetta, a medical researcher and friend to investigate the curious death of his childhood friend Souma Keiichirou,who is a military doctor. Kimura is one of the researchers attached to the mental hospital who live in the Souma manor with the Souma family. When he went to the bathroom in the night, he noticed blood seeping from beneath the door of a basement room which haven't been opened for years, as the key has been lost. When they break the door open, they find Souma Keiichirou lying dead on the floor. He has apparently stabbed himself with an ornamental dagger, but he's also been sliced with a scalpel, which has not been found inside the locked room. While the police decides this is just a weird suicide, Kimura thinks it might be murder and he and the butler decide to hire Toudou to investigate the case and as Toudou starts asking questions to all the curious people who live in the Souma manor, he learns everyone has a secret to hide, but which of them is actually involved with Keiichirou's death?

As I mentioned, if you have played any of the major adventures that follow the Riverhillsoft adventure game model, you will have played all of them, and Aen no Hakobune is exactly that. You are just dropped in the game, and given many, many locations to visit in the Souma manor, and you are required to talk to a large cast of characters (over a dozen) and question them about a large number of topics (20~30 depending on the character). They might have something interesting (compressed into two text boxes...) to tell you about character X or Y, or about related topic 1 or 2; they might not. But you are still required to ask them about everything. Multiple times sometimes. The underlying idea is cool: at the start you know absolutely nothing, but as you interview everyone, you slowly start to make connections between all these topics: character A and B might offer you insights about character C (or even allow you catch them lying). You are initially free to choose who to interview about what in any order you like, so in that sense, it allows you a kind of freedom you seldom have in mystery games. But in practice, it just means talking to everyone about everything, which activates certain story flags, so then you go ask everyone about everything again, because *someone* might tell you a bit more now you have learned more information, but you seldom actually know what changed, so you are forced to explore every option you have just to make sure you didn't miss out on something. Sometimes learning fact A from characters B and C simply activates the possibility to talk about D to character E, even though it's not related at all. 

That said: Aen no Hakobune is one of the nicest games following this design, with a more limited cast and smaller location. Earlier games had you interview like 30, 40 people about as many topics, now it's just over a dozen! And some of them die over the course of the game! It's definitely the least tedious entry of the series to play and I barely needed to use a walkthrough this time (Yeah, I needed help to find that piece of evidence suddenly spawning in the bathroom at a certain point of the game even though it hadn't been there before...).

These games are ones that really would benefit from a modern remake though, more so than the Another Code games I mentioned at the start. The game design of these games is so horribly outdated, even though the atmosphere in these games is usually really good, and there are genuinely interesting characters to be found here, but they are usually just confined to speaking two or three text boxes about each topic, and can't really speak freely. But in Aen no Hakobune specifically, there are glimpses of really interesting topics that could've been put in the front much better, also to make the mystery more enticing, like a female researcher who is not respected by her peers because she's a female doctor in 1920s Japan, the rising militarism in the country, musings about the Great War in Europe and its consequences for the people in Japan, the mental hospital and the secrets it holds and so much more, but because of the very limited speaking freedom of all the characters, it never feels like you get the full picture. The locked room mystery in Aen no Hakobune isn't really interesting, but there's a pretty gruesome second death, but you don't see enough of the people's reactions to that, and the investigation into the decapitation seems a bit.... dry, even though you can make that so much more interesting mystery-wise. The motive of the murderer and the underlying backstory is also very interesting, firmly set in the context of the 1920s setting, but it is presented to the player is such a disjointed manner, it never feels as impressive as it could've been. There's honestly a lot of potential to tell much more compelling mysteries in these games, if the presentation and design was just more player-friendly.

A huge problem of these games as they are is also the fact you can't actually re-read most dialogue. Unlike so many other mystery games, you barely collect evidence or testimony in this game. Especially the fact you can't gather testimonies (or at least have a kind of summary) really hurts these games. Character A will mention once they saw character B doing something, and that'll allow you to press on B on that, but you'll only see the dialogue once (and there's a small mark on the screen for a second to indicate this was a story flag), but there's no way to re-read that in any way, so if you decide to do something else first, there's a good chance you'll forget that. A more modern game would likely record the testimony in same way and then allow you to present that evidence to the corresponding character. Or if these games were made now, at the very least they would give some kind of screen that records what testimonies you have gathered about each person to guide your investigation.

By the way, while I was happy I could play this game for a normal price, the DS version and subsequent iOS version do have much nicer (and larger) art... I wonder why they never put out the iOS versions of this series on Switch; they did release the first three J.B. Harold games on the Switch, based on the iOS versions...

Anyway, Aen no Hakobune is not a remarkable mystery adventure game by any means. It follows the model of the Riverhillsoft adventure games very rigidly, though the slightly more limited scope does make it a much more easier game to play. You play these games more for the atmosphere and the potential for a good story/characters, rather than the actual game, I'm afraid, but I always end up playing one of them once every two years or so... But I really, really hope someone would try to do an extensive remake of either this series or the J.B. Harold series, implementing completely different gameplay mechanics but keeping the underlying story beats and character reveals the same while also fleshing everything out. But I guess that's an impossible dream...

Original Japanese title(s): 『亜鉛の匣舟～相馬邸連続殺人事件』

The Sea Mystery

No swellings tell that winds may be 

Upon some far-off happier sea—

 No heavings hint that winds have been

 On seas less hideously serene.

"The City in the Sea"

Huh, that's funny, this is a detective game with a historical setting about Ryuunosuke, who studied in England, and who has to solve a mysterious death on a ship crossing the world. And it's probably not the game you were thinking of.

After the Great Kanto Earthquake in September 1923, private detective Toudou Ryuunosuke boards the liner Shouyoumaru in San Francisco to retun to Japan. On the second day of his trip to the harbor of Yokohama, a passenger and waiter bump into each other, toppling a barrel on the deck, but to the great surprise of the few people on the deck at the time, a skeleton comes falling out of the barrel. The captain of the ship is called, who wants to keep things quiet as he fears news of a skeleton on board might cause a panic, but one of the guests who was silenced finds it all a bit too creepy, so she confides in Toudou Ryuunosuke about the affair and hopes that he, as a detective, can find out where that skeleton came from. Toudou accepts the job and starts poking around on the ship, which is transporting many people from professors, photographers to military men, but also of course the large crew of the ship. But while Toudou is investigating the affair of the skeleton, a crew member is found murdered in the ship's barber shop and Toudou is officially asked by the captain to look into the murder. But how are the skeleton and this murder connected? That is the great mystery in the mystery adventure game Ougon no Rashinban ~ Shouyoumaru San Francisco-kou Kairo Satsujin Jiken ("The Golden Compass ~ The Murder Case on the Shouyoumaru on the San Francisco Harbor Route", 1990).

Ougon no Rashinban is the second entry in the Toudou Ryuunosuke series originally created by Riverhillsoft, a developer creating adventure games for Japanese PCs in the eighties. Their star writer was Suzuki Rika, who would later set-up her own company Cing which was responsible for a few great mystery-themed adventure games on the Nintendo DS and Wii (the Another Code and Kyle Hyde series). During her time at Riverhillsoft however, she also created a few well-known series in the mystery scene in Japan: besides the Toudou Ryuunosuke series, she also created the J.B. Harold series, about the Liberty Town detective J.B.. The Toudou Ryuunosuke series, also referred to as the "1920 series" as the games are set in that period, originally "ended" with Ougon no Rashinban by the way, but after Riverhillsoft closed, Althi acquired the IP. Althi would release the original games on the DS, but also on (pre-smartphone) mobile phones, and they would also create brand new entries in the series. I don't think Suzuki Rika was involved with the games after Ougon no Rashinban, but there are like nine of them in total. As a fan of Suzuki's work, but also because of my interest in mystery adventure games in general (also the older ones!), I had been wanting to play this game for a long time, as I had once seen footage of the original PC version, and it looked quite good. I ended up playing the Switch port of the mobile phone port of the game by the way. I can't quite find when this game was released on mobile phones, though I guess it'd be in the first half of the 2000s like most of these games, and the Switch port released earlier this month (Thanks to G-Mode, which has been releasing these old mobile phone games!).

Putting it bluntly, if you have played any of the major Riverhillsoft adventure games, you will have played all of them, as they are all extremely similar in design. And there is a caveat: the game design is really dated. So these games are not really something you'd want to play very often, in succession. Like always, after a short introduction of the case, you are just dropped in the game, and given extremely many locations to visit, to talk with also an extremely large cast of characters. I'm talking 30, 40 persons, spread across at least as many locations. Ougon no Rashinban in particular has insanely many locations to visit, basically the most of any of the Riverhillsoft games I have played. The game allows you to basically visit any room on the Shouyoumaru, but many of those rooms have to function at all in the game, and are just there to inflate the number of options. So a lot of it is just to waste your time (outdated game design). Once you have found someone to talk to, you can talk to them about like 60 different topics per person. 60(!), you say? Yes, you can ask each person about all the other characters on the ship, about the incidents you are investigating, about other things going on and also show them the evidence you have. Do that times 30-40 people, which you have to find on the ship, and you can see how dated the design feels.

 

I like the basic concept of these games though, as they give off a feeling of being open-ended. At the start of the game, you can visit a very large amount of locations from the start, and as you start talking with the passengers about all the topics, you slowly start to see the connections between each character. A might seem like a nice guy at first, but when you talk about A with B, B might reveal something interesting about A. By talking to everyone, you'll slowly start to connect dots to create lines, and very slowly, your suspicions regarding a character will be risen. But because initially, you are fairly free to tackle these interviews with the characters in any order you like, it feels kinda open-ended, especially considering this was a game originally released in 1990. Ougon no Rashinban does streamline this a bit, as the game is divided in chapters (a specific part of the trip/time of the day), and once you have obtained all the necessary information about everyone/everything of a chapter, it will move on to the next chapter, with time also passing by between each chapter. Within a chapter, you have relative freedom, but this chapter division does make the game feel more... alive, I guess, as characters move around between chapters and there are also actually story developments.

But because the game is quite old, the game design feels very tedious. In each chapter, you are just basically just going around EVERY room and talk to EVERY person, because you need to activate the story flags that will allow you to move on to the next chapter. But you simply can't know beforehand where those story flags are hidden. Sometimes, a character will suddenly decide they can reveal something about a different character, even though they wouldn't do that in the previous chapter. Sometimes, you just need to confirm they don't know something.  Sometimes, just meeting with a character turns out to be a necessary story flag. There is a flag counter for each chapter, but more often than not, I thought I had done everything, and then it turned out I had 140 out of 160 flags for that chapter. And then it turned out I hadn't spoken with a character about a character he didn't have anything to tell me about in previous 10 chapters, but now decided he knew something interesting about! Or when the men's bathroom is completely useless for 13 chapters long, but then you do need to search in chapter 14 to find a piece of evidence. The official site of G-Mode for this game actually has a hint guide/walkthrough and while it will direct you to do the trickier parts, it often skips necessary flags too, giving you only like 90% of the tasks you need to do each chapter. So I'd be following the walkthrough step by step, and still end up missing like 10 story flags, which I'd have to look for myself.

 

You'd think I hate this game, but I do really like the atmosphere, the character art, and the story that is told. But it is very much a game of its time, and this game has probably about 1.5 times the locations of the J.B. Harold games, making it feel much more tedious, as there are so many rooms that are just there as filler. But yeah, this is the type of game that truly deserves a remake, because mystery adventure games have come so far in three decades. I mean, even the most basic of things, like a menu with a character list or relation chart is nowhere to be found, even though the cast is huge! (as I am writing this, I learn the original PC version had one! Why didn't the mobile port have it too!?) There is not even an in-game map to tell you where every passenger is staying on board of the Shouyoumaru, you have to write that down yourself. Mechanically, all you can do in this game is talk to other characters. There is no real interactive mechanic by which you, as the player, have to solve the mystery yourself: you are never punished, nor are you asked to answer questions yourself. You just gather information, and the game will connect the dots for you. Searching rooms for evidence is also just selecting an option, and Toudou telling you whether he found something or not. There are so many things in Ougon Ranshinban a modern game would streamline and make more enjoyable to play. In the game, you "listen" to a lot of testimony of characters about others, and sometimes, that will allow you learn someone has been lying to you, but you can't actually actively confront someone with that knowledge. The player themselves have to remember character B told them something about A, which activates a story flag, meaning the next time you talk to A, Toudou will automatically press A about the matter. A modern game would probably use a testimony inventory system or contradiction mechanic to give the player more agency to actually detect the mystery themselves, or at least allow them to have some kind of mechanic to allow them to re-read important testimonies. And while the mobile phone version does show a little mark when you hear something for the first time (activate the flag), a modern remaster would streamline the general flow a lot, meaning less wandering mindlessly around having to check every location and talk to everyone about everything, and limit your options more. Meanwhile, a more modern take on the game would also allow you to see more directly of the Shouyoumaru itself, which is an interesting location. Each character actually has an interesting story behind them, even if their lines are fairly short, so it'd be cool if that could be developed more, allowing them to speak in more detail about the interesting parts of their part of the story, while cutting the huge amount of "I don't know anything about that" lines.

But as said, the art of the original PC version is really nice, and while the mobile phone port looks, understandably, very cramped, it does have a nice atmosphere...

As a murder mystery, Ougon no Rashinban doesn't rely on clever tricks or anything, it's really about slowly uncovering the various relationships between the many characters on the ship, and slowly zooming in on the suspect, but I think that, especially considering the time this game was released, this was a pretty good effort in terms of character-focused mystery fiction. So it'd really benefit from a modern take on the same base story and characters, as I do think this part is done well, it's only very dull and monotonous to play.

Having played so many of Riverhillsoft's adventure games, I can't say Ougon no Rashinban ~ Shouyoumaru San Francisco-kou Kairo Satsujin Jiken surprised me very much. It plays like I had expected it, and tells the same kind of human-focused mysteries I have learned to appreciate. But at the same time, I have the feeling this game tried to be more ambitious by having even more locations to visit, but that only resulted in a more tedious game as so many of the "added" content is just empty filler. I think that of all mystery games I have played, these Riverhillsoft adventures would benefit the most of a remake, with actual interactive mystery-solving mechanics, as the story itself is usually interesting. I wonder if there's a market for that...

Original Japanese title(s):『黄金の羅針盤 翔洋丸桑港航路殺人事件』

The Mystery of Magnolia Mansion

"We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people; all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be."

"Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor"

There's nothing quite comparable to the transformation process of a videogame ported to different hardware, remastered or remade. I mean, novels are published with new covers all the time, but usually the contents remain (mostly) the same. One might be tempted to first think of censorship when it comes to post-publication text changes, but there are of course more reasons: from updating the body of text for later printings to correct spelling/grammar mistakes that had been overseen earlier, or perhaps because to reflect new spelling conventions. Most of the Rampo I've read for example, has been corrected for modern Japanese conventions, rather than the original pre-war spelling conventions (which can be very different). And then there are also the cases where the author chooses to change the text contents-wise, sometimes because there's a special occassion that allows them to go over their writings again (a brand new reprint for example), sometimes because an internal error was pointed out to them and they want to correct that. Ultimately though, these changes across versions of books are incredibly minor when compared how different the same base videogame can be across hardware and versions. The transformation process can be quite varied: sometimes it's a brushed-up version like a remastered, cleaned-up version of a film, sometimes the game has to be built completely anew from the ground up for a specific piece of hardware, which makes it a bit more similar to a remake of a film, but often at the core closer to the original game than a remade film usually is.

The iOS version I played of the Riverhillsoft adventure game Kohakuiro no Yuigon - Seiyou Karuta Renzoku Satsujin Jiken ("The Amber-Colored Testament - The Tarot Serial Murder Case") looks and sounds nothing at all like the original game which was released in 1988 on the Japanese PC-8801/PC-9801 personal computer systems, and even the way in which the player interacts with the game (the interface) is completely different, but the core plot and the progression in the game is basically the same. After the original release, this game has been ported and remade for a lot of hardware, from MSX2 to Windows 95,  Nintendo DS, iOS and Android, often changing appearances quite drastically whenever it arrived somewhere else. It's quite strange to see the same mystery story look and sound so drastically differently, yet be in the same medium (videogame). It's something that I just can't imagine with a mystery novel. The screenshots in this review are from various versions and look nothing alike, but they are also clearly the same core game.

But no matter on what hardware you're playing the game or how it looks, it always starts the same. Kagetani Koutarou was a very wealthy man in the 1920s who made a fortune with the trade in medicine. One day, he was found dead in the garden by his granddaughter and it was determined he had died because of poison. While it didn't seem likely the man would commit suicide, the remaining family members, including his second wife and several sons and daughters in varying ages from both his first and second wife, seem very reluctant to help the police, and the investigation soon gets stuck. The private detective Toudou Ryuunosuke is hired by the Kagetani family butler, who is convinced his master was murdered, but who wants the case to be investigated in a discreet manner, as the murderer is likely someone of the family. Toudou is invited to the Kagetani manor as the author friend of Kagetani Koutarou's nephew and is allowed to stay a few days as a house guest. During his stay, Toudou attempts to lure each of the Kagetanis into revealing what they are hiding about Koutarou's death, but little did he know that the first death was not to be the last.

Kohakuiro no Yuigon - Seiyou Karuta Renzoku Satsujin Jiken ("The Amber-Colored Testament - The Tarot Serial Murder Case") was the first game in the so-called "1920 Series" of mystery adventure games starring the character Toudou Ryuunosuke, but when developer Riverhillsoft closed in 2000, the rights to this series went to Althi, which renamed the series to the current Toudou Ryuunosuke Tantei Nikki ("The Detective Chronicles of Toudou Ryuunosuke") title. If this case this sounds familiar: the same actually happened with the J.B. Harold series, of which I have reviewed the first three games. The J.B. Harold games were also mystery adventure games originally developed by Riverhillsoft and the rights too were transferred to Althi (its current developer/publisher). One name that has to be mentioned to is that of Suzuki Rika: she originally worked at Riverhillsoft, and it was she who wrote both the Toudou Ryuunosuke and J.B. Harold series. She left Riverhillsoft with some other employees to start her own company Cing, which was responsible for a few great mystery-themed adventure games on the Nintendo DS and Wii (the Another Code and Kyle Hyde series), until Cing went defunct too in 2010.

As a mystery game, Kohakuiro no Yuigon basically plays exactly the same like the J.B. Harold games. The story starts in a non-linear manner, as you are free to walk around in the enormous Kagetani manor and you can visit each suspect in your own preferred order (and there are a lot of characters). As you chit-chat around, you'll learn facts about the other characters that will raise your suspicions towards that character (for example, A will say she saw B in the kitchen, or B will say that C hated the victim.) As you talk with each suspect about all the other suspects and other facts, you'll slowly connect the dots and construct a clear profile for each character. Once you have gathered enough information on a certain person, you can confront them, which usually results in you learning a significant fact that brings you closer to the truth. Rinse and repeat and you'll eventually find the killer. Different from the J.B. Harold I've played until now is that the murders don't stop with the first murder of Kagetani Koutarou (who is killed in the prologue anyway). Like the subtitle The Tarot Serial Murder Case suggests, more murders follow as you progress in the game and start poking around, but it's all part of the story and there's no threat of the player running out of time or not being able to solve the game because a suspect's been eliminated. Not much thinking is required on the part of the player, though making the connections yourself does make the game a lot smoother: if you yourself can't remember what line of investigation you're pursuing at the moment, you'll be forced to go around questioning everyone on everything, which can take ages. I can basically quote myself from the J.B. Harold: Kiss of Murder review to summarize my thoughts, as the games are, mechanically speaking, almost identical:

Kiss of Murder's emphasis lies on unraveling the complex ties between all the characters. At first, you'll only have a face and a name, but as you progress, you'll slowly uncover how each of these characters are connected, and most of them will turn out to be quite different from your first impression. As a game it's certainly not a very engaging or thrilling experience, as you're basically only going through dialogue, with everyone snitching on each other. The fun lies in going through this story in a non-linear fashion and making the connections yourself in your mind, as the game itself doesn't explain (for example, the game might tell you need to confront suspect A with their lies now, but you yourself have to remember that a while ago, suspect B and C both provided proof that suspect A had lied in completely different testimonies). At the best times, it does really feel like you yourself are solving this case, but at the worst of times, Kiss of Murder feels like a chore, as you run around asking everyone about everything in the hopes of coming across a clue. 

I do like the 1920s setting though. There are basically no other mystery videogames that use this setting. Almost. A few years ago, I reviewed the PlayStation 2 game Glass Rose. Which was also set in a fancy Western-style manor in 1920s Japan. But if you read the review, you'll understand that this is no coincidence, for Glass Rose was a game written by the same Suzuki Rika, but in her Cing period. It is quite clear Suzuki was also thinking of her older game Kohakuiro no Yuigon when she was working on the 2003 Glass Rose, for there are a few neat references to be found: not only do these games share the same time setting, the protagonist of Glass Rose is also called Kagetani and what was most surprising was that the floorplan of the second floors of both the Kagetani manor and the Kinema Mansion in Glass Rose are exactly the same, only flipped upside down! These are the kinds of inter-work references I really like!

Kohakuiro no Yuigon - Seiyou Karuta Renzoku Satsujin Jiken is not a mystery adventure game I would immediately recommend to everyone. You can tell it's a very dated game from the way it plays. It's very sober in design and the story moves very slowly. It is atmospheric though, and as a fan of Suzuki Rika's work, I simply couldn't skip this one. If you've played games in the J.B. Harold series, you know exactly what you'll get. Considering how similar they play, they are almost interchangeable, but I did find the story of Kohakuiro no Yuigon less engaging than the three J.B. Harold games I've tried.

Original Japanese title(s): 『琥珀色の遺言～西洋骨牌連続殺人事件～』