Playing games with an emphasis on story.

Name: Ring of Fire
Status: Incomplete. Prologue Only
Site: https://farfewgiants.itch.io/ring-of-fire
Pairing: Gen
Description: Take an incident report of a violent murder but that's it.



Ring of Fire is a murder mystery game that covers some serious crimes, including child sexual abuse, just to get that out there on the onset. It's incomplete, and has been incomplete for over three years now. Considering that this is effectively a puzzle game, not being able to complete the puzzle condemns the game, full stop, though if it were by some chance to ever actually be completed, it might be interesting to play.

You are a hard boiled detective, dragging an eager rookie around on his first murder case. Your tools are basically your little handheld in which you can search for people and places to get a little info, and a map nav which will take you to a place if you can determine the exact address, often discovered by performing the right search. In the demo there is only once scene you can inspect, which is the murder scene, and there are a few locations you can go to to interview people who may be able to help you with the case. Talking them will bring up a dialog where you can make certain choices about how to approach the situation. Your partner will give you a little bit of feedback about how you're doing, as well as give you more chances for dialog

Outside of some visual ambiguity the mechanics of this game felt pretty smooth, and were it complete may have resulted in a satisfying puzzle game. At the very beginning you get a warning that you have to really play detective, or something like that, and a pen and paper are suggested. As far as I could tell, this is mainly because there is no way of reviewing information that's been given to you in dialogs. If someone tells you they were at a location, you better remember that location or have written it down, because they're not telling you again. I'm curious about what would happen if you just end up completely stumped an unable to find the info you missed, but since this is a demo, there's no way of telling how the game might handle a soft lock like that.

I like puzzle games, and am intrigued when a game insists that you're really going to have to work out some puzzles to win, so it's a real shame that in the demo at least you don't get to the point where you're working much out at all. Even then I had already gotten a little stumped by forgetting to just "google" the victim's name! So maybe I wouldn't have done well if the game had been complete. Ultimately it's a moot point.

Name: Manna for our Malices
Status: Complete
Site: https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices
Pairing: Mildly F/F
Description: Figure out why you keep getting murdered

This is a murder mystery VN where you're both the victim and the person tasked with solving the case. The main character is an expletive spitting Japanese school girl named Akagi Ai. After an unremarkable day at school she's stabbed in the back on her way home, and wakes up again at the top of the day. From then on she repeats her day over and over again, trying to figure out why she keeps dying, and why she keeps coming back to life.

 

( Read more... )

 

The writing in the game is hyper otaku. It's set firmly in Japan with a strong American sense of humor and mindset, but it goes so hard on it I came to appreciate the dedication to the aesthetic. There are maybe a couple of moments, particularly in the end, where the transitions between scenes are not quite solid, but otherwise I found this to be a fun, relatively short little puzzle with a bunch of fun over the top supernatural themes.. It's a shame Malices doesn't have more polish, because mechanically it was fun to figure out. At a mere 1 dollar, I actually think this game is worth a buy, regardless of how it looks.