The First Hardship of Nagomu Ichiyanagi - The Rain-Lattice Mansion / 雨格子の館 一柳和、最初の受難

An isolated house in the rain... A series of gruesome, themed murders... And a wimpy kid who has to solve them all.

These are the elements that make up Nagomu Ichiyanagi.

The game opens with Nagomu, our protagonist, driving home from what was supposed to be his summer job. As his luck would have it, the building burned down just before he arrived, so instead Nagomu had to immediately turn back. As his luck would have it, Nagomu’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere during a massive thunderstorm. Nagomu is able to see a house’s light in the distance, but, as his luck would have it, as soon as he gets to the grounds he discovers a corpse and is knocked unconscious.

He wakes up inside the house, where a group of actors have come to shoot a film. The cast arrived a day early, with the crew scheduled to arrive the next day. Nagomu tells them all about the corpse, but when they go outside, there’s nothing to be found.

The next day, they discover one of them has been brutally murdered, the only road to the mansion has been blocked by a landslide, their cars’ tires have been slashed, and all their means of communication to the outside world have been cut. You know, the usual stuff.

And, to complete the set-up, they realize they actually have no idea who summoned them to the mansion. They were invited by the writer of the movie script, who is an incredibly famous and talented screenwriter... that has also managed to keep his (her?) identity from the public completely hidden and is known only as the “Hatmaker.” Plus the group has no assurance that their invitations were from the real Hatmaker, so it could be the work of literally anybody.

A new murder happens every day, so it’s up to you to solve these dastardly crimes and find the real killer! Well, most of the characters just want to wait for the storm to pass so they can call the police, but you’re a huge scaredy-cat, so you can’t help but investigate. It might sound strange that Nagomu investigates because he’s a massive wimp, but an unknown killer at large is much more frightening than a caught one.

The game lasts a week, and each day consists of a few scripted scenes and one or two chunks of free investigation time. In free investigation time, you move around the mansion by selecting rooms from a floor plan. The rooms are rendered in full 3D, and you can investigate them from a static, rotating viewpoint, like an escape-the-room game.

You can also, naturally, question the other inhabitants of the mansion. You have a list of keywords consisting of names, places, objects, pieces of media, and concepts. The keyword bank starts off small, but anytime a new keyword comes up in conversation or investigation it gets automatically added, leading to a large pool by the end of the game. You then can use every keyword as a conversation topic for everybody.

Every action during the investigation (moving, examining, and talking) uses some of your “action bar,” and the free investigation period ends (and the next scripted event begins) when the action bar depletes. Unlike games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa where you have unlimited time to complete a small, specified set of examines and talk conversations, in this game you have a limited amount of time to select from a massive amount of possible avenues of inquiry. As a result, planning your tactics become key to conducting an effective investigation.

One small annoyance during investigations is that you can only ask each person one or two keywords per conversation. If you exit and re-enter the room, you can talk to them again. So there’s no limit on how much you can talk to someone during the investigation; you just need to take extraneous steps to talk to someone multiple times. It feels unnecessary, and investigations would be much smoother if you could talk to someone as many times as you wanted in one session. (Obviously, asking about more keywords should still consume more of the action bar, though.)

The game also has a rudimentary trust system, where characters are willing to tell you more or less based on how much they trust you. However, the vast majority of each character’s trust level is based on the choices you make in their introductory conversation the first night, so rather than a dynamic system where you need to work towards building up trust with everyone throughout the week and worry about taking actions that might make you seem suspicious, it’s much more about trial and error until you find the proper combination of choices on the first night. Thankfully, the trust level affects how much characters talk (that is, how many keywords you can ask about per conversation) rather than what they say, so while the trust system doesn’t end up adding much to the game, it never serves as a major impediment to investigation either. This is something that I think would be interesting to see fleshed out in another game (Nagomu Ichiyanagi or otherwise).

Another neat feature of the game is the alibi chart. For each murder, once you finish questioning everyone, the game will automatically compile their alibis into a chart. As you uncover everyone’s lies, mistakes, and omissions, you can freely edit the chart to show the true events of the night. The alibi chart is an incredibly useful and intuitive way to summarize and keep track of all the testimony you get over the course of the game. In order to successfully confront the killer you need to correctly mark their movements on the alibi chart, but it doesn’t matter what you put down for any of the other characters, which I think strikes the right balance of making sure you’ve figured things out without requiring you to get a needlessly large number of minor details correct.

The game lets you make an accusation at any point in time—even the first day!—so you can confront your suspect as soon as you’re confident in your reasoning. (Except you can only enter a legitimate confrontation sequence with the true culprit, another place where the game gives itself away.) The confrontation is great with twists and turns until the very end, and requires tons of preparation to get the best result.

With so many places to explore and questions to ask the witnesses, Nagomu Ichiyanagi is a game that’s meant to be played many times on your quest to uncover the mysteries and achieve the best ending. If you’ve ever replayed a mystery game, I’m sure you’ve wished that, with the benefit of hindsight, you could stop the characters from making all the stupid decisions they make and just prevent all the deaths from occurring. Well, in Nagomu Ichiyanagi, you can.

One of the key objectives of the game is not only to solve the murders that have occurred, but also to prevent the future murders the culprit is planning. The killer models all their murders after the books of the fictional author Enjirou Takatou. Every day the killer leaves a clue as to which book they will use as the basis of that day’s murder. To prevent the murder, you need to use the clue to figure out which of Takatou’s books the clue is referring to (there is a full set of Takatou’s works in the mansion’s library for you to browse), warn the intended victim, and then dispose of the items the killer will likely use in the murder. For instance, if you deduce from the clue that the next murder will be modeled on a book where the victim was stabbed to death with a knife that was found being held by a mannequin, you might get rid of all the knives in the kitchen and dismantle all the mannequins you can find.

Trying to prevent the murders is an awesome gameplay mechanic, but it perhaps plays out a bit more clunkily than one might hope. The issue, at its core, is that your first playthrough is the only one where you don’t know what will happen in the next murder. In your initial run, racing the clock to figure out the book and find the proper objects is exhilarating. But you either succeed—and thus know the answer for subsequent playthroughs—or fail—and come to know the answer for subsequent playthroughs by seeing the victim and the state of the crime scene. While the later murders do become a bit more involved and tricky to prevent, the murder prevention mechanic is never as engaging as the first playthrough. That being said, the initial experience of trying to solve the killer’s riddles and beat them at their own game is still an awesome experience I haven’t seen in other games. I think Nagomu Ichiyanagi also deserves credit for not just allowing you to prevent the murders, but doing so with an in-game justification for the characters to be able to do so (rather than merely relying on the player’s knowledge of future events).

Naturally, the fact that you can prevent the murders (but also fail at preventing the murders) means that sometimes characters will die, but sometimes they won’t. All the scenes are written to account for every combination of living and dead characters up until that point, which is a pretty nice touch. On the flip side, because there are so many murders, after your first playthrough, the identity of the culprit—arguably the biggest mystery of the game—can be deduced by process of elimination. In short, while the idea of being trapped in a traditional And Then There Were None-esque situation where you have the power to prevent the tragedies makes for a unique game, there are a few noticeable drawbacks.

Just to be clear, I think the drawbacks are worth it! Even if you know the killer's identity and each day's intended victim, there is still much, much more you need to do and solve to uncover all the mysteries and achieve the best ending.

The music and graphics for the game are passable, but a bit on the mediocre side. This is a PS2/PSP game, but even taking that into account the sound quality seems low. The music creates a sufficiently spooky atmosphere to fit being stuck in an isolated mansion with a bunch of strangers and a homicidal maniac, but has very few memorable tracks. The mansion is rendered in 3D while the characters are represented in 2D sprites, creating a graphic style similar to Danganronpa or Hotel Dusk. The art shows what’s going on, and the subdued color scheme matches the somber atmosphere.

There is one absolutely infuriating moment in the game. In the nooks and crannies of the mansion, you can find a series of poems. When you find these poems, the game doesn’t tell you what they are or even let you read them. It turns out that they are the clues to a puzzle hidden in the mansion. The only way to read the poems is to press “Select” while on the puzzle screen—except the game never tells you this, and this is the only place in the game the “Select” button is used! You have no reason to realize the poems you’ve collected are the clues to the puzzle, and even if you do figure that out, the game never tells you how to actually view the poems. This is an unusually frustrating moment in a game that is otherwise straightforward to navigate.

Finally—the plot. It’s good! There are a number of murders that can potentially happen, and they each present a nice sort of puzzle. There’s no grand overarching trick, but each individual murder is a neat mini-puzzle; the game feels much more in the vein of Christie than Carr. The fact that you need to investigate each mystery on your own, rather than having the pre-established evidence list handed to you (like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa) makes solving even the simpler mysteries feel satisfying.

The characters are neat, and varied enough to keep you entertained for the duration of the game. There is a massive number of keywords you can ask the characters about, which means you can get lots of random side-conversations with them. Given the number of possible talk topics, the number of “I don’t know anything about that” throwaway answers is surprisingly small! The cast aren’t people you’ll probably take with you for a long time, but you’ll enjoy the time you do spend with them.

Nagomu Ichiyanagi is a solid game. It doesn’t have a particular stand-out quality, but its open-ended nature makes it unique among detective games. While the technical aspects might be a bit lacking, the story and characters deliver. Nagomu Ichiyanagi is probably the closest you’ll ever get to feeling like you’re actually in a detective novel, so I definitely recommend it to fans of the genre.