Murder By Numbers

PC, Switch

Ed Fear was about to board a flight to Japan when he decided to check his email. Less than 24 hours earlier, he’d submitted a prototype for Murder By Numbers, having spent six weeks assembling what he admits was a very rough proof of concept with assets borrowed from Google Images. He scrolled through his inbox and found his idea had been approved. “It’s the fastest greenlight process I’ve been through in my life,” he says.

No wonder. A murder-mystery visual novel with Picross-style puzzles, and music from the Phoenix Wright composer? We’d have given it the go-ahead on the spot. Yet the idea of combining a detective story with nonograms had been gestating for about a decade, Fear says – and this wasn’t the first time he’d pitched it. He seized his chance when Mediatonic, the studio at which he’d written charming Roguelite Swords Of Ditto, discussed the idea of developing a smaller project alone. “Our teams are normally about 20 to 25 people, and we tend to get funding from publishers,” Fear explains. “That sets a number of parameters on the sort of projects you end up pitching. Obviously this didn’t quite fit, because it’s smaller and more narrative-led when publishers aren’t looking so much for that.” Having kept the idea in his back pocket for so long, he knew this was the time to dig it out.

Fear’s story, co-written with Murray Lewis, follows Honor Mizrahi, an actress on a TV detective show. Having been fired by her boss, she’s shocked to learn of his death shortly afterwards, particularly when she realises she’s in the frame for the killing. And so she teams up with Scout, a robot with the handy ability to scan crime scenes for potential evidence, to clear her name.

“It’s a very simple gameplay loop,” Fear tells us. “Some previous iterations were more complicated, but I decided to really boil it down.” As Mizrahi, you’ll visit a variety of locations, using Scout to locate clues, each prompting a simple nonogram puzzle. (Some of these are delightfully grisly – you don’t get ‘strangulation marks’ as a solution in any of Jupiter’s Picross games.) Once you’ve solved them they become evidence to be presented in conversations with suspects and witnesses, to get them to open up or to prove they’re lying. Shades of Ace Attorney, then, though Fear is keen not to be so exacting: there are no fail states, and you don’t need to produce evidence on specific lines of dialogue.

“I wanted the investigations to be less pernickety,” he says. “These nonogram puzzles have a very casual appeal, so I wanted to make sure the adventure game behind them wasn’t too complicated.”

If the core hasn’t changed much from Fear’s original pitch, the visual style has evolved thanks to the involvement of manga artist Hato Moa; indeed, that Japanese trip was to attend the Xenogears 20th anniversary concert with her. The two hit it off when Mediatonic had handled the remake of Hato’s visual novel Hatoful Boyfriend, and so this was the perfect opportunity for Fear to ask if she’d like to work on Murder By Numbers. “But it sounded like she was so busy that I chickened out,” Fear laughs. He later canvassed for a character designer on Twitter; Hato DMed him, asking if she could design a few minor characters. “My immediate reply was ‘Oh, Moa, you can do all of it!’”

Hato nailed the design for Mizrahi on her first try, Fear tells us, though the outfits required a few fashion tips on his part– those wonderfully garish ’90s styles he grew up with were evidently quite different from Japanese couture at the time. With a little help from Friends – Hato had watched the first season of the comedy during her time working with Mediatonic – and a dash of Queer Eye, those distinctive outfits started to come together. Given the current preponderance of ’80s aesthetics at the moment, it’s another way for Murder By Numbers to stand out from the pack. With a planned release date of ‘very early’ next year, this could well be 2020’s first breakout hit. “When we started, it was part of a project called Mediatonic Minis,” Fear says. “It’s definitely not mini now.”

You don’t get ‘strangulation marks’ as a solution in any of Jupiter’s Picross games

MAIN Fear didn’t expect to use an anime style: “I find Japanese people are very good at seeing when anime or manga-style stuff is drawn by non-Japanese artists. But when Moa came on board, I said, well, let’s go for it.”

TOP RIGHT Co-writer Murray Lewis previously worked with Fear on a Fantastic Beasts hidden-object game: “I had a good vision for the overarching story and the characters. But writing compelling mysteries is really hard. And Murray had a lot of experience with that.”

BELOW RIGHT Sugimori’s themes make sure the right tone is struck. “It’s this weird mix – light-hearted while also being about murders,” Fear says

BELOW LEFT There are no time limits for the nonograms, and players can use as many hints as they like.

ABOVE Scout has his own backstory, as a recon robot who was discarded after an unspecified incident.