Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is, as you might surmise from the title, an Ace Attorney-inspired murder mystery video game. (Games in that sub-genre are never particularly subtle about their inspiration.) The main feature that differentiates Tyrion Cuthbert is the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world with magic. Well, I suppose technically Ace Attorney has already done that, but unlike that game, where the use of magic itself was the crime, here we’re solving crimes that just happen to take place in a world with magic.

I love Ace Attorney and I love the Ace Attorney cross-examination system as a vehicle for deductive mystery gameplay and I love when people try to recreate that special Ace Attorney magic. But I don’t love Tyrion Cuthbert. I like Tyrion Cuthbert, and I want to love it, but I don’t. There are simply too many rough edges for me to fully accept the game. The worst part is that Tyrion Cuthbert is still one of the best commercial Ace Attorney-likes I’ve played, because the genre just doesn’t seem to ever get any entries that even approach their inspiration.

Tyrion Cuthbert is clearly an earnest indie passion project and there are lots of good ideas, so to be honest I feel a bit bad criticizing it. But that’s not going to stop me. I think the creator has potential, so I’m not going to mince my words, but my intent is to provide constructive feedback (on the off-chance they ever read this), not to make fun of and denigrate them.

The biggest issue in Tyrion Cuthbert is probably the fact that the developer does not understand Ace Attorney pacing. In my opinion, the pacing in Ace Attorney is what sets it apart from other mystery games. Most modern Japanese mystery games are firmly set within the shin-honkaku movement, which can directly tie its roots to Golden Age “fair-play” mysteries, and as a result many of these games try to be fair. Which is a massive mistake. Danganronpa is boring to me because it presents everything up front, meaning I have to wait hours for the characters to catch up with obvious conclusions.

Ace Attorney isn’t fair, and that’s why it’s great. Its puzzles are fair—you always have the answer to any question it asks—but its mysteries are not. Ace Attorney carefully and intentionally drip-feeds you information so that you can make the next step in the logical chain required by the game, but not enough so that you can see the entire path from your current spot to the end. That’s the secret to the Ace Attorney magic: because they withhold information, they are able to consistently present twists and surprises during each case’s runtime. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible (or even difficult) to identify the killer or some big twists early, but Ace Attorney doesn’t fuss about ensuring you go into the trial with all information, and in fact makes sure to hold some information back to present at the most dramatic moment.

Tyrion Cuthbert just doesn’t get this. It gives you everything upfront, earnest to prove it’s playing fair and not hiding anything up its sleeve. Evidence is massively detailed, sometimes with multiple paragraphs of information, and a good portion is never even used. But the details in the evidence description consistently give away the game. For instance, spells are added to your notes like evidence, and always immediately have all relevant information. So a spell description might mention that any object affected by the spell will have a green afterglow (even if this detail isn’t mentioned in the dialogue when the spell is discussed), and then if a character mentions seeing a green afterglow somewhere, you know that it will turn out that spell was used on that object. There’s never any nuance or trickery.

(I find that for concepts like this, instructive examples can serve better than negative examples. This “green afterglow” spell is something I just made and is not in the game, but if I was to actually include this in an Ace Attorney-like game, my first thought for how to incorporate would be to explain the spell and what it does in the investigation, but not mention the green afterglow. At trial, at some point the player needs to suggest the possibility that this spell was used on a certain object (but not the object it was actually used on). The prosecutor then objects and explains that the spell leaves an afterglow. The object the player suggested had no afterglow, and therefore it couldn’t have been targeted by the spell. But then you can present the object that did have the afterglow, revealing that it was targeted by the spell, and proceeding from there. Thus we’ve created a gameplay moment and introduced a small twist in the trial by strategically hiding information from the player. And that's just from a random example I made up!)

A side effect of this issue is that Tyrion Cuthbert lacks much of the tension and defense-prosecutor power imbalance that makes Ace Attorney so thrilling. When you go into an Ace Attorney trial you have your cards, but you don’t know how you’re going to play them—you’re flying by the seat of your pants, where failure at any step means a guilty verdict for your client. In Tyrion Cuthbert, however, because the investigation gives you all the information you need, you go in knowing what you want to say, and Tyrion gets to just say it, and that’s the trial. Obviously I’m simplifying, exaggerating, and generalizing, but I stand by my core assertion. While cases 4 and 5 of Tyrion Cuthbert do manage to start throwing curveballs at the end of their trials, most of the trials are mainly just regurgitating your findings and deductions from the investigations.

This also causes the trials to go lightning fast. If the game is just going to retread ground I’ve already figured out I’d much rather it do it quickly (rather than in a Danganronpa-like slog), but the issue is that Tyrion Cuthbert maintains this pace even when broaching new ground. The interesting puzzles and questions that are introduced in the trials are solved almost immediately with no time to bask in them. Every mystery basically has its solution telegraphed early in the investigation, or is solved within five minutes of being introduced, with no in-between. Witnesses are typically on the stand for one testimony, maybe two—they say their piece and leave. There’s no development or progression, either from a character or mystery perspective. Tyrion Cuthbert’s developer was able to make functional mystery plots, but they were unable to create engaging paths to the solutions, which is what mystery games hinge on.

I find Tyrion Cuthbert’s structural shortcomings especially disappointing because its ideas are good! …Some of its ideas are good. The first three cases suffer most from the issues I described above, and even repeat a solution. But cases 4 and 5 introduce fun ideas and use them in creative ways. These cases still suffer from plotting issues, but I can at least get behind the ideas they’re presenting.

Overall, Tyrion Cuthbert lacks finesse. And that applies not just to the structuring of the plot, but also the actual execution and writing. Inconsequential details (such as whether it's the day of or the day after the crime) are inconsistent from scene to scene. Certain details are also odd and just seem lacking in some sense. For instance, one case involves a murder at a formal party, but the murder takes place at 3AM… That’s really late for a party to still be in full swing! The entire timeline of the case should have been six or seven hours earlier (and there’s absolutely nothing that would change or need to be tweaked by shifting things back that way).

I know I said that the game has ideas I like, but even when I like the idea I sometimes find the execution lacking. (The rest of this paragraph mentions and generally describes a plot element found in the later part of the game but doesn't give any mystery spoilers. Rot-13.) Vapyhqvat qrzbavp pbagenpgf va n zntvpny ynj tnzr vf oevyyvnag, ohg gur vzcyrzragngvba vf gurzngvpnyyl ynpxvat. Qrzbavp pbagenpgf fubhyq or Snhfgvna onetnvaf gung gbezrag gur fvtare ol cebivqvat rknpgyl jung gurl jnag naq uvatr ba grpuavpnyvgvrf naq jbeqcynl, ohg va gur tnzr gurl'er rvgure fgenvtugsbejneq be purnc gevpxf.

Tyrion Cuthbert is an indie game with a limited budget and therefore limited artistic resources, but it doesn’t know how to properly leverage and make use of those resources. For instance, in one of the first scenes of the game, a merchant approaches Tyrion. The merchant is an unimportant character, and uses a generic one-off sprite (that is reused throughout the game for background characters). The prose describes how the merchant has a sleazy grin… but the sprite is somber and stoic. This is sloppy and immersion-breaking. I don’t think an extra expression for the merchant would have been too much, but even if the developer could only get one pose/expression for the merchant, since it’s an original asset, it should then have showed him smiling! And if that wasn’t possible for whatever reason (for instance, maybe the scene was written after the sprite was created), then the scene should have been written around the sprite. For instance, instead of saying that the merchant was grinning, remark that despite his imposing appearance he was actually acting friendly and affable.

While none of these details are individually a big deal, they add up. It feels like the developer was sloppy, or edited one part of the script without carrying over changes throughout the whole game, or just didn't have a good grasp of the details and timeline of each case, but no explanation is that great, and robs the game of polish.

Oh, I should probably mention that Tyrion can read minds. He has a power called “The Eye of Horus” that lets him see people’s thoughts and emotions. (Think a super-powered Mood Matrix.) It only gets triggered by strong thoughts and emotions, which is code for it only works when and how the plot wants it to. Which means, aside from one cute gag in one case, nothing interesting is ever done with it. On one hand that’s kind of a shame, but on the other hand this would basically trivialize the mysteries even further if it was always going off, so it’s basically expected. (Tyrion does develop another power tied to the Eye of Horus later that is plot-relevant, but it’s easily separated from the Mega Mood Matrix, so I’m still not treating the latter as plot-relevant.)

Gameplay is pretty much exactly the same as Ace Attorney, which a few modern conveniences. You can move to any location from any location, for example, and investigation hotspots have an icon that pop up, so you still need to pixel hunt a bit but it’s pretty easy. The main deviation from Ace Attorney is a system where you need to make a sentence from three or four segments with three or four options each, which is taken directly from Detective Grimoire. There are a few other gameplay elements as well, but they’re basically just the same evidence-answering gameplay in a slightly different context. For instance, sometimes in investigations you need to have an “argument” with someone to convince them of a point, but you just present evidence and answer multiple-choice questions, the same as in trial. (Think of them like psyche-locks.) Tyrion Cuthbert also essentially disposes with penalties and game overs, which honestly is fine since they never had any real bite behind them when you could save and load at any time.

The art and music is pretty much the level you’d expect for an indie VN. Some sprites have minor animations, which is a nice touch, but some sprites are also a bit weird. You aren't going to play the game for or remember the art, but the art won't serve as a distraction either. (Other than to the extent the limited graphical assets weren’t properly integrated with the script as I did above, at least.) There’s plenty of attention to the UI and small flourishes, so I do think the developer did a good job given the budgetary constraints.

The main characters are likeable if tropey. I will give Tyrion Cuthbert credit for allowing the core cast to have real flaws and conflicts, which is something Ace Attorney seems frightened to do, especially as it's become more and more of a Saturday morning cartoon. On the flip side, the side characters are shallow and largely forgettable. This is partly due to the breakneck trial speed. In Ace Attorney, witness testimonies serve not only to progress the mystery but also to explore the characters, and contradictions often tie into the witness' character. But when they only give one testimony, there’s no time to do that. In Tyrion Cuthbert, for the most part they really are just witnesses—they’re there to give a factual account of what they saw so that we can progress in the story—and not characters, whose thoughts, goals and flaws shape the story.

The game is quite forward with its politics, as the overarching plot is about how the nobility sucks and is oppressing the commoners. But every case is about how much the nobility sucks, and every murder occurs because the nobility sucks. The fact that every motive in the game is a variation on the same note prevents even the killers from being particularly memorable or distinguished.

If you like Ace Attorney, you should play Tyrion Cuthbert. While the first few cases are rough and Tyrion Cuthbert never quite reaches a point where it’s great, it at least presents functional mystery stories within an Ace Attorney system in a novel setting. (I’d definitely recommend it before Aviary Attorney, at least.) The flaws in Tyrion Cuthbert are pervasive, but they don’t feel hopeless, either. These feel like the mistakes borne from inexperience, not incompetence. A sequel for Tyrion Cuthbert is apparently in development, and I truly hope that the developer has reflected upon the shortcoming of their first game and is able to improve for their second. If they can, I think they will be able to create something special, like the original Ace Attorney.

And if you want to see just how far an Ace Attorney-style case in a setting with magic can be pushed, just play this.