Moai Island Puzzle / 孤島パズル

Moai Island Puzzle is the sequel to Moonlight Game, once again following college student Alice Arisugawa as he and university mystery club leader Jirou Egami encounter a series of grisly murders on a trip. Moai Island Puzzle is a dazzling display of pure adequacy. Despite the tantalizing premise, I didn't really get much more out of it than Moonlight Game, but it's not like the book is bad or anything.

As in my Moonlight Game review, "Alice" will refer to the character and "Arisugawa" will refer to the author.

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass

Do you like mysteries? Actually, no, that's not the appropriate question to ask. Do you love mysteries? Think carefully about your answer. I'm not asking if you think you love mysteries. I'm asking if you truly, with your heart and soul, love mysteries, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else. Because The Sekimeiya seems like it was made for somebody who does.

On paper, The Sekimeiya is very close to how I likely would have described my ideal mystery game before playing The Sekimeiya. There is an endless deluge of mysteries, plenty of content, an incredibly tight plot, and unique ideas taken to their logical extreme. Yet in reality the experience is difficult to unabashedly enjoy. There are a lot of things that The Sekimeiya does right and that it does great, and there are no immediately obvious technical faults, so exactly what went wrong?

Let's take a trip into the labyrinth to explore that question.

Chaos;Head Noah / カオスヘッドノア

Takumi Nishijou is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill reclusive socially anxious MMORPG-addicted anime-obsessed self-absorbed rude cowardly acerbic loner Japanese teenager that lives alone in a storage container on top of an apartment building. Y'know, the usual. One day weird things start to happen, and Takumi wants them to stop, and... that's pretty much the entire plot of Chaos;Head. (I'm not calling it "ChäoS;HEAd," sorry not sorry.)

Blasphemous

Blasphemous is a 2D metroidvania that makes Bloodborne look downright agnostic.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

There's no reason to act coy: even if it doesn't have that word in the title, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a Castlevania game. And a pretty good one!

Murder in Small Town X

I've already reviewed on this blog proprietary material from Whodunnit?, a mystery gameshow that was if nothing else an entertaining, rare mix of genres. But "rare" does not mean "only," and in fact Whodunnit? was preceded over a decade earlier by another murder mystery-based reality show: Murder in Small Town X.

Murder by Numbers

If you poke around the internet for thoughts on Murder by Numbers, pretty much everyone who discusses it compares it to Phoenix Wright with Picross, to which I have just one thing to say... [XXXXXXXXX]!

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite, in loving tribute to the first game, begins with a man at a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. But rather than descending leagues under the sea, the lighthouse launches the man into the sky, to the flying city of Columbia. He's there to find a girl and deliver her to his creditors to wipe away his debt. Naturally, things soon take a turn for the worse, and the man—Booker DeWitt—soon finds himself fighting the entire city to accomplish his mission.

This is a Bioshock game, but rather than continuing the story of Rapture, Bioshock Infinite takes us to new heights in Columbia. There are plenty of other differences to go along with the change in scenery, but the soul and many game systems remain the same. That being said, while Columbia is horrifyingly fascinating to explore and the plot is admittedly well-constructed, I just don't feel as charmed by Bioshock Infinite as I do by the original.

Closed Casket

Once again, we have a Hercule Poirot novel written not by Agatha Christie herself, but the modern writer Sophie Hannah. Hannah's first Poirot book, The Monogram Murders, was well-written but over-plotted. How does her second Poirot story, Closed Casket, fare?

...Basically the same.

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.

Close Enough to Kill

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I thought I should review something with a bit of... romance. Unfortunately, all I had was Close Enough to Kill, and there's absolutely nothing to love about it.

Exile Election / 追放選挙

Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Every so often we get a groundbreaking, massively influential video game, and while such masterpieces might have plenty of originality, they’re never completely original, and always build upon previous works in some way. For example, take Dark Souls, which formed the bedrock and namesake of the Souls-like subgenre, and has been used as a point of comparison so often it’s become a meme. It’s arguably the most influential game of the past decade (if we exclude the mobile market). But neither Dark Souls itself nor the underlying ideas that led to its success and influence popped up out of nowhere. Dark Souls very clearly inherited a lot from Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware’s previous game. And if this was an essay on video game genealogy and not a review for a game that I haven’t even mentioned yet, we could dig even further and identify Demon’s Souls’ influences.

My point is that for every massively popular, genre-defining game out there, there are going to be other games that laid the groundwork for it. And that means that other games need to actually lay the groundwork. They won’t be highly-polished pinnacles of perfection, but a unique idea or two in an otherwise ordinary package with an execution that will range from flawed to decent. And that’s what I feel like Exile Election is. It introduces some original ideas to the death game subgenre, but they just... aren’t very good. They’re not bad, but not very good, either. Exile Election seems to me like a game that is underwhelming on its own, but will someday serve as a reference point that someone will use to identify, analyze, and rectify in their own game in order to make it fantastic.

Death Among the Undead / 屍人荘の殺人

Sometimes it feels like orthodox detective stories belong to a dead genre. The "Golden Age" came and went a century ago, and that really does seem like it was the perfect time period for classic puzzle plots. Forensics could provide basic information about a crime, but technology hadn't progressed so far that nearly any physical trace could blow a trick wide open. Plus, as the genre has developed and readers have become more savvy, it's become more and more difficult to develop original tricks that will surprise and delight readers.

But then every once in a while you get a work like Imamura Masahiro's debut novel Death Among the Undead which, through sheer originality and style, kindles hope that the genre can be reanimated.