Jisei

Jisei is a murder mystery visual novel about a teenage boy who has the ability to experience someone else's death by touching their corpse. (Kind of like his own personal divination seance... although it doesn't help him much this time.) We don't ever learn why he has this power, or, interestingly enough, even what his name is, so... let's call him Jessie. Over the course of the game we get various tidbits about Jessie, who serves as a neat, minor underlying mystery as we investigate the more pressing murder.

Jessie wakes up in a coffee shop (his triple espresso had made him sleepy), and discovers a corpse when he goes to the restroom. An off-duty cop happens to be there, and the cop takes control of the initial investigation. And Jessie, uh, helps/snoops.

Jisei is a tight, straightforward game. There's only four characters besides Jessie—the off-duty cop, the perky barista (voiced by Kira Buckland?!), the skeptical businesswoman, and the shy college student—and the entire game takes place within the coffee shop. The only actions you can do in the game are talk to people, examine the location, and move. And the "examination" is just a button you click to have Jessie remark on the location, not an actual point-and-click investigation you can conduct yourself. While there's a deduction segment at the end and a handful of dialogue options, the game is mostly linear.

As a result, the game is basically spent cycling through all the locations examining them and exhausting conversation options until you trigger the flag for the next segment. It's simple, but you spend more time chatting with people and investigating than trying to trigger the plot flags, so it ends up fine.

The plot is... unlikely to impress anybody. It's a simple case, and after spending the entire game chatting with everyone, basically the entire thing is solved merely through a cursory investigation of the evidence (which nobody does until the end of the game, for some reason). The small cast and constrained setting give Jisei a chill, cozy atmosphere, but also make it feel a bit contrived and artificial. We're in a random, small coffee shop, and yet (as far as we see) no other customer ever tries to enter. The police proper don't arrive until the very end of the game, even though we're presumably in the middle of some town or city.

That being said, the ending has some pretty neat reveals for the overarching story that definitely piqued my interest, enough that I'm undoubtedly going to check out at least the next game in the series. While it'd be disappointing if the future entries never rise above the level of Jisei, I don't want to drop the series here. I have a feeling (or maybe it's just a hope) that judging the entire series based on Jisei would be like judging Ace Attorney solely on The First Turnabout.

From a technical standpoint, the game is fine. The music is fitting, and the graphics are nice. The sprites and backgrounds are missing that final bit of polish that triple-A games have, so Jisei looks like an indie game... but a competently made indie game. It's also fully voiced (except for Jessie), which makes Jisei feel much more professional than it otherwise would. All in all, there isn't really anything to complain about on this front.

While the mystery might not be anything special, I still like Jisei as a chill, simple, competently-made game with some neat sequel hooks.