Switch Back / 今はもうない

The S&M series has always had a lot of character work and philosophical tangents, and while they sometimes felt a bit overbearing, they never intruded on the mystery plot too much. But in Switch Back it feels like Mori has really drank his own Kool-Aid. I don’t know if Switch Back is my least favorite S&M book, but it’s definitely in the bottom tier. While the mystery plot isn’t bad, it’s incredibly bare, leaving the rest of the page count to be filled by awful character work.

The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me is the grand finale to “season one” of The Dark Pictures Anthology. While it’s larger in scope than the previous games and unquestionably boasts the greatest technical leap in the series, it feels like that came at the expense of the story. That doesn’t mean it was bad, because it wasn’t. There’s very little in the game that I would call bad, but also very little I’d call great. It’s a decent entry in the series, but the high point of season one remains House of Ashes.

The Locked Rooms of the Twin Snakes / 双蛇密室

The Locked Rooms of the Twin Snakes is the fourth book in the Lychee Kamiki series starring the titular high school prostitute detective, and I think it’s the perfect entry to read in the Year of the Snake. The book explores the past of Hiroshige Aikawa, a recurring character from the previous books that’s a policeman and one of Lychee’s clients. Other than the hardcore sex scenes, this book provides basically exactly what I’m looking for, with a wild but well-clued solution and a streamlined investigation with basically no fat to cut.

House of Ashes

House of Ashes is the third game in the The Dark Pictures Anthology, after Medan of Medan and Little Hope. The first two games were fun but flawed, and the premise of House of Ashes seemed a bit lackluster… but it ended up being the strongest game so far, showing that Supermassive is not content to rest on its laurels and is aiming to improve with each iteration of the series.

The game takes place in Iraq in 2003, near the beginning of the US occupation shortly after Saddam Hussein was deposed. We (mostly) play as a group of US military operatives searching for WMDs. However, during a skirmish with some Iraqi soldiers in a small village, a chasm in the ground opens up, causing members from both sides to fall into the ruins of a long-forgotten Sumerian temple. The former enemies will need to learn to work together to overcome the horrors of the ruins if they want to have any hope of returning to the surface....

The Tragedy of 1 / 一の悲劇

I assume most people reading this blog know who Ellery Queen is, but for who don’t, he (actually the joint pseudonym for two cousins) is one of the most influential writers from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He was famous for novels resolved by a chain of deductions from physical clues, used to narrow down the suspect list to one candidate. While there aren’t many authors writing mystery stories with that style of plotting in English nowadays, there are plenty of Japanese writers who have adopted the style, including Alice Arisugawa and Yuugo Aosaki (who was marketed as “Queen of the Heisei period” with quite unfortunate timing since Japan’s emperor passed shortly thereafter, ending the Heisei period).

But another author who writes in the Queensian school is Rintarou Norizuki (which, like Ellery Queen, is both the author’s pen name and the name of his fictional detective), author of The Tragedy of 1, which is clearly a reference to Queen’s Drury Lane series. To be honest, I’m not sure why I read this book. As you may have noticed from my blog, I usually play a series or read an author’s work in order unless there’s a particular reason to start with a different work. The Tragedy of 1 is not Norizuki’s first novel, and I can’t remember what (if anything) prompted me to buy it... but I suppose it’s a decent choice to read “1”st.

(Following the same convention as my Alice Arisugawa reviews, Norizuki will refer to the author and Rintarou to the character.)

Little Hope

Four college students and their professor are involved in a bus crash on a field trip, dumping them outside the small town of Little Hope in the middle of the night. Thankfully there are no serious injuries, but things become strange when a mysterious fog prevents them from heading away from town. With no other options, they venture into Little Hope—where they see mysterious visions of the past and are chased by monsters. As a result, the group must investigate their strange connection to the town while staying alive long enough to find help.

Process of Elimination / 探偵撲滅

Process of Elimination is another Danganronpa wannabe from Nippon Ichi Software, following in the footsteps of Exile Election. Process of Elimination and Exile Election feel like together they form one Danganronpa: Exile Election focuses on a death game and trials, while Process of Elimination has quirky gimmick-based characters and murder mysteries. However, despite my flippant first sentence, I liked Process of Elimination a lot. It’s certainly lacking in certain respects, including providing comprehensive fair-play mysteries, but is so earnest in presenting a story about detectives that I can’t help by enjoy it.

Man of Medan

The elevator pitch for Man of Medan (and The Dark Pictures Anthology) as a whole is that it’s a horror B-movie you can play. If you’ve played Until Dawn or The Quarry, you should already have a pretty good idea of what Man of Medan is like (they’re all made by the same company, Supermassive), although Man of Medan is a bit shorter and more focused on co-op. Man of Medan isn’t an amazing game, but does what it sets out to do, and beggars can’t be choosers within the realm of branching co-op horror narrative adventure games.

Man of Medan begins with four friends who have chartered a small boat for a vacation going diving in the South Pacific. However, things quickly go south (Pacific) when the group is attacked by pirates, and then brought to a ghost ship known as the Ourang Medan that allegedly houses “Manchurian Gold.” The group must contend with both the pirates and something far more sinister if they wish to escape the ship with their lives… (As a side note, “Ourang Medan” roughly translates to “Man of Medan,” so the title doesn’t refer to an actual person.)

The Wonder

Anna O’Donnell hasn’t eaten since her eleventh birthday four months ago.

Or at least, that’s what she and her family claim. 

As word of the girl spreads, some people believe Anna has received a divine blessing, while others claim the O’Donnells are just lying fraudsters. In order to settle the matter once and for all, a few community members decide to hire a neutral outside observer to watch Anna for two weeks and see if she actually eats or not. Thus Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a Nightingale-trained nurse, travels from England to Anna’s small Irish hamlet. 

Is Anna’s fast a hoax? Or if she truly a wonder? 

Those Who Sneer Like the Mountain Fiend / 山魔の如き嗤うもの

Another Genya Toujou book, another series of bizarre murders in a remote village that are entangled with the local folklore. Those Who Sneer Like the Mountain Fiend is mainly set in the village of Kumado, but the impetus begins in the nearby village of Hado. Nobuyoshi Gouki is the youngest son of the Gouki family, a prominent clan in Hado. While Nobuyoshi’s father and brothers are outdoorsy and outgoing, Nobuyoshi is subdued and introspective. Naturally, he does not have a particularly happy upbringing. He leaves Hado to go to college in Tokyo and doesn’t look back. The Gouki family has a coming-of-age rite where each family member must visit three shrines in the holy mountains neighboring the village, but Nobuyoshi uses his studies as an excuse to put off the rite.

Eventually, however, once Nobuyoshi has graduated and gotten a job as a teacher, his grandmother persuades him to undergo the rite. While Nobuyoshi was always the black sheep of the family, he sees this as a way to potentially earn acceptance. Even if Nobuyoshi isn’t as physically active or familiar with the mountains as his brothers, the rite is essentially a day hike through a single-path trail, so it’s not a huge undertaking. 

Obviously, it doesn’t go as planned. (But, miraculously, it doesn’t end in murder!)

Who's the Shadow? / シャドウ

Who’s the Shadow? is about Ousuke Gamo, a boy whose luck would give the Baudelaires’ a run for its money. First his mom dies, and then his best friend’s mom dies, and then his best friend gets hit by a car. And that’s just the start of the book.

The Devotion of Suspect X / 容疑者Xの献身

I had The Devotion of Suspect X on my bookshelf for a while. It was famous and supposed to be really good, so I eagerly bought it. Then I realized it was technically third in the “Detective Galileo” series, so I bought and read Detective Galileo. And any interest I had in reading Suspect X dissipated. I hadn’t abandoned it completely—it was famous, after all—but I had no active desire to read it anymore. I figured I’d get around to it eventually… and eventually has finally come.

Fortunately, The Devotion of Suspect X is much, much better than the Detective Galileo stories, structured as an actual mystery novel and not a series of cheap science fair experiments. I didn’t love it, but I did enjoy it.

The Maid

The Maid needs to clean up its act. Ostensibly it’s a cozy mystery, but in reality it’s more like a contrived, saccharine story about an autistic woman overcoming adversity to find happiness.