Murder By Numbers
PC, Switch
The most passionate Ace Attorney admirer will concede that there are moments where it doesn’t quite add up. Even in the thrall of a master storyteller like Shu Takumi, there are logical jumps that must be made – whether it’s the upshot of the writer’s brain being several steps ahead of the player’s, or those moments where a hole gapes and Takumi simply extends a hand, promising that what awaits on the other side is worth the leap. Murder By Numbers would appear to solve that problem. It’s pitched as ‘ Phoenix Wright meets Picross’ and that’s precisely what you get. Given the unassailable logic of nonograms, surely everything here will make perfect sense; the gaps, after all, are ours to fill. In the end, the puzzles are both asset and weakness, but we end up with a fundamental truth that ties Murder By Numbers to its most obvious inspiration – that a rattling good yarn will almost always cover any cracks.
Set in the 1990s – in part to build the kind of mystery that smartphones would probably solve all too easily – its premise sounds like the kind of highconcept TV show that would have been instantly greenlit back then. Honor Mizrahi is an actor playing a TV detective on Murder Miss Terri, albeit second fiddle to her titular partner. After being unexpectedly fired by her boss, she finds herself in the frame when he’s murdered immediately afterwards. With no alibi and a motive, she must use what she’s learned about detective work on the show to clear her name. As luck would have it, she has an ally in the form of Scout, an amnesiac robot which encounters Mizrahi after awakening in a nearby garbage dump with its memory wiped.
You use Scout to scan environments – whether sweeping a crime scene for evidence, or looking for an escape route or hiding place during more threatening situations. Since its visual output is impaired, its image-reconstruction software produces the kind of pixellated results you’d associate with a nonogram. The interface is clear and intuitive, feeling particularly at home in handheld mode. On the Normal difficulty setting, it allows for slips of the finger (even so, we recommend using the face buttons rather than the analogue stick) instead of instantly punishing mistakes. You can mark squares before committing to colouring them in or crossing them out, and if clues point to a string of one or the other, you can hold a button and move along a row or column to quickly complete it, as it skips the ones you’ve already filled. You can toggle hints that tell you which rows or columns have possible moves, which doesn’t affect your score when completing them. Alternatively, you can ask for five random squares to be filled or any errors you’ve made to be highlighted – and these do affect your tally. This is, in short, a textbook example of how Picross should be done.
Yet by the third case almost every clue is a 15x15 grid, and when you’re invited to scan an area for several in a row, they become too much of a good thing, slowing the pace of the story. Beyond a few time-sensitive hacking challenges which invite you to complete a series of quickfire 5x5 grids, there’s little variety. The plotting attempts to mitigate for this, usually finding plausible excuses to have you revisit locations, finding new evidence to prompt fresh lines of enquiry. Whether you’re re-interviewing existing characters or being introduced to someone new, you’re never left with an unwieldy number of items to focus on or suspects to interrogate. Nor does it waste your time when you present the wrong item to the wrong person, with brisk one-liners that are often context-sensitive. When Honor asks her hairdresser friend KC for his thoughts on a variety of non-critical items, for example, he’ll comment, “You really need to clear out that bag, babe.”
Writers Ed Fear and Murray Lewis sneak little character flourishes like this into incidental dialogue, in a script that shows a deep fondness for its cast – and even some sympathy for the perpetrators across the four cases. Which isn’t to say it’s aggressively pleasant: from the moment Honor’s unbearably smug ex-husband makes his entrance, you’ll be counting down the minutes until his comeuppance. Its politics are rather more progressive than you might expect for the time, though its strong LGBTQ representation in particular reads simply as a corollary of its central cast’s inherent decency. The nature of Scout’s gender identity is also nicely handled – there’s something simultaneously amusing and heartwarming about a collection of 1s and 0s effectively declaring themself non-binary.
As Ace Attorney pastiches go, you’ll struggle to find one finer. The characters might not be animated, but Hato Moa’s appealing character models flick between a clutch of expressive reactions, their cutouts shuffling back and forth to avoid stasis during extended dialogue scenes – and sometimes sliding offscreen to comic effect. Though the objection tennis of those thrilling courtroom arguments is missed, the twists and turnabouts are punched home with the aid of Masakazu Sugimori’s energetic score. Even with the music turned down, you could be convinced you were playing a Phoenix Wright spin-off by the quizzical chimes that sound when suspicion is aroused or a new piece of evidence comes into play, or the thwack that accompanies zingers and sudden revelations. The text sound, meanwhile, is lawyer-baitingly close.
Yet Wright himself would be unlikely to object to a game with such affection for its biggest influence. With smart foreshadowing, surprising twists and reveals and an overarching narrative deftly threaded throughout all four cases, Murder By Numbers isn’t shamed by the comparison. While it ties its narrative strands neatly enough to work as a standalone story, Mizrahi and Scout would be well worth a sequel.
In the end, the puzzles are both asset and weakness, but a rattling good yarn will almost always cover any cracks