Follow the story of an ex-actress and a mysterious robot as they team up to solve crimes through the power of picross.
Murder by Numbers
Developer: Mediatonic
Price: $15
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Switch
MonsterVine was provided a PC code for review.
Murder by Numbers puts you in the shoes of Honor, an actress on a detective show who gets fired shortly before her boss is murdered. After teaming up with a mysterious robot who is looking for answers about his past, Honor starts searching for the truth and discovers she has a taste for real detective work after all.
It’s presented like a cross between a visual novel and an adventure game, with different locations to visit, clues to search for, and characters to question or present evidence to. At first I found the white outlines around character sprites to be off-putting, but I quickly got used to them. The game also has a catchy soundtrack, with songs that often got stuck in my head long after I stopped playing. What really sets Murder by Numbers apart from similar games, however, is its heavy use of picross.
Picross puzzles, also known as nonograms, present you with a grid and a series of numbers that show you how many groups of adjacent squares in each column and row should be filled in. For example, a row labeled “3 1 4” would contain a group of three squares, then one, and then a group of four, with at least one blank space between each set. In this way, you use the provided clues to fill in the entire grid and create a picture. The puzzles in Murder by Numbers start out simple, but quickly become challenging.
The game initially explains its use of picross by saying it’s how the robot processes visual information, but you’ll soon learn it uses picross for just about everything. Inspecting an object in the environment? Picross! Receiving an item from another character? Picross! Unlocking parts of the robot’s memories to learn more about his past? Picross! A hacking mini-game that makes use of simpler, timed picross puzzles shows up occasionally to provide a refreshing break, but the repetitive nature of the gameplay started to wear on me after a while.
Since picross is the bulk of the gameplay, your picross talents will play a major factor in how long the game takes. The story is split across four relatively short cases, but you’ll be solving picross puzzles every step of the way. I love mystery games, so I had high hopes for Murder by Numbers, but unfortunately the plot never pulled me in. Each case has a fairly simple story, with both social commentary and funny moments sprinkled in, and they connect together to form an overarching plot–which progresses at a crawl between picross puzzles. The robot is probably the best part of the story, with a lot of humor coming from his attempts to understand humanity and interact with other people, but despite my hopes for the game, it wasn’t enough to keep me invested.
The Final Word
If you like picross, Murder by Numbers has some entertaining dialogue and colorful characters to go along with your puzzles. If you aren’t going into this for picross first and foremost, however, the rest of the game isn’t going to carry it.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
