Board 8 > 2020 's first real GOTY candidate (Murder by Numbers Thread)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Murder by Numbers is an Ace Attorney/Picross mash-up that features music by the original Ace Attorney's composer and character designs by the dude who did Hatoful Boyfriend. It comes out for the Switch in one week - March 5, 2020.

It has a 90's theme song, viewable here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1IxqH_AP3Q

Gameplay here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByxupoXy5WM

You can pre-purchase the future GOTY for $15 on the eshop, while it will presumably retail for $20 on release.

Might do a playthrough topic if this thread lasts that long.

The purge rate guarantees it'll be here next week.

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...go on.

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From the makers of Gears Pop!

jc I'm looking forward to this. I will buy anything with picross puzzles in it

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first bump

I have never played a Picross game, but I watched the gameplay video and it seems simple enough. Maybe the game will get stale at some point, but if the writing's good enough it might not matter.

i'm going to be a grumpy negative person because i've already had people go out of their way to tell me about this (elsewhere) after its announcement in the last indie world showcase

it's an extremely tumblr feeling game with names attached to guilt trip people into saying it's good. i'm not really impressed

the discount runs until a week after release actually, so you can wait until later that day/weekend to see the reception. pretty good on the devs! I'm pretty excited for this and hope it delivers.

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UF8 posted...

i'm going to be a grumpy negative person because i've already had people go out of their way to tell me about this (elsewhere) after its announcement in the last indie world showcase

damn i'm really sorry you had to go through that. it's really unfortunate when people express excitement for works reminiscent of things they love.

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two things i love, though idk if there's much to be gained by combining them. still, i'm interested.

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case one beated. game seems like a winner so far!

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Haven't forgotten this, just been finishing up my golden deer run before I start on this

probably gonna fire it up later today

Some first impressions after about an hour, spoiler-free (unless you count character names as spoilers)

I woke up in a dump with amnesia. Are we sure this isn't Ghost Trick?

"Overlapping" kind of hurts my brain a bit. Also, Picross in general kind of hurts my brain. I'm playing on normal but I'll probably wimp out to easy in a few hours.

Honor is good so far. What little of her backstory that's been teased is interesting. Hopefully she gets a lot deeper as the game progresses! Apparently she's divorced maybe? or separated? which skews the game toward an older audience than AA, which is neat.

Honor scout. Scout's honor. I just now got this. I'm an idiot.

They mention tampons and gay guys are allowed to flirt in non-creepy ways - that's how you know this is a "Tumblr game." I can already hear people complaining about how SJW's ruined their anime puzzle games!

Bill's theme slaps. So does the first puzzle solving song (and the rest of the music isn't bad either!) On par with AA music.

Out of Becky, Bill, K.C. Tully, John, and Detective Cross, I don't have any problems with any of them (assuming the important ones get some development later on). Pretty sure John is the culprit of case one though.

The gameplay is now taking shape. You can still investigate, question, and move around like an AA game. You can even present evidence, which is what is uncovered by doing the Picross puzzles. Cool idea that hopefully won't get old!

Quality of life stuff: opening the map is set to - and the menu is +, which is annoying. Why not just make it X? Also, as far as I can tell you can't save during a conversation scene, which is not a huge deal assuming they're all relatively short. Also, tiny thing - the "episode one" card/intro was super underwhelming - make it stylish!

The vent puzzle was kinda hard. Yeah, I'm probably going to have to switch to easy by the end of Case 1, lol.

You mean Kakarot wasn't GOTY ontender?

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Some pretty good/funny presenting going on.

The game seems to get AA's humor/tone pretty well.

(no spoilers past case 1 in this post)

I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Picross. I didn't really know what to expect. As a seasoned pro, nothing in case one was that hard for me, but they do seem to ramp up pretty nicely. I was afraid it would be baby puzzles the whole way through. There's even a timed reflex section with a fairly tight time limit! Some interesting sizes too. I've seen 10x5's and 15x10's. Wonder if there'll be any 20x15 or 20x20's. I hope so.

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nice to see this living up to expectations!

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whoa, forgot this was out already and it turns out with the release week sale I have just enough leftover steam wallet funds to grab it immediately, nice. guess I know what I'm doing later tonight when vgmgg is done!

DeepsPraw posted...

(no spoilers past case 1 in this post)

I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Picross. I didn't really know what to expect. As a seasoned pro, nothing in case one was that hard for me, but they do seem to ramp up pretty nicely. I was afraid it would be baby puzzles the whole way through. There's even a timed reflex section with a fairly tight time limit! Some interesting sizes too. I've seen 10x5's and 15x10's. Wonder if there'll be any 20x15 or 20x20's. I hope so.

10x5 still sounds like baby puzzles to me, but maybe my perspective is skewed from being introduced to picross by GAMES Magazine spreads that start from 15x15s and can go all the way up to 50x50 hefty boys :V though seeing the mention of easy/normal difficulties in TC's post I am curious now if there's a hard mode as well...

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Oh wow it's old man Gumshoe

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Zyxyz0 posted...

10x5 still sounds like baby puzzles to me

oh for sure. It's just something you don't see in the Jupter games outside of clip picross

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I'm now officially stumped by a Picross puzzle - it's a "C-level" SCOUT memory, so it's not required. Again, this is my very first time ever playing a Picross, and I have no idea how to handle a 10x15 where all the clues are basically "1_6" and less. Are these puzzles supposed to be a lot of trial/error or am I missing something fundamental here?

After I spent an hour or so on this one I looked at the "S-level" memory. It looks difficult but I can't tell how much MORE difficult it is than the C-level.

I haven't used any of the cheats either - the ones that fill in random squares.

Also finished Case One; an intriguing ending, but the delivery leaves a little to be desired. Feels like there could've been a lot more punch there.

yeah the optional scout puzzles are definitely harder. Post it. I'll walk you through it when I'm off work

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I eventually figured it out, though I did use the "highlight errors" cheat a couple times

weirdly, I thought the rest of the SCOUT puzzles were much easier (the B,A, and even the S rank)

here's the most useful tip no picross tutorial ever tells you. imagine all the blocks of numbers as close together as they can be starting from one edge, with one space between each block, then look at the number of empty squares remaining at the end of the row or column. any block higher than the remainder can have its difference filled in

example: 1 3 2 row in a 10 wide puzzle.

two empty spaces remaining on the end, so the 3 can have it's third square filled in


it's the same in reverse, just remember to count from opposite side

In both cases, the 5th square can be safely filled in.

every picross tutorial ever tells you to think about how sections overlap, which is good for a single large number, but not easy to visualize for numerous small numbers.

You can use the following process to quickly see if a line has fillable squares at the start of a puzzle:
add up the value of each hint number on a line.
add the number of hint numbers minus one (AKA the minimum number of spaces in between)
subtract that from the total number of empty squares in the line.
if your answer is higher than any of the hint numbers, nothing can be filled in. if it's zero, you can fill in the entire line. any hint numbers higher than your answer can be partially filled (see above)

example
1 2 1 2 2 1 in a 15 wide puzzle
1+2+1+2+2+1=9
9+5=14
15-14=1

you can then fill in half of each 2

or


basically you're still doing the "overlap" logic, but in a shorthand way that's way easier than drawing it out every time

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Gotta admit, I don't really get it but thanks!

Just noticed a minor glitch -

I've been hitting "load game" from the menu whenever I screw up a puzzle so badly I just want to start over. I did it in Chapter 2 and instead of taking me before the puzzle it took me to a scene directly after the puzzle (so it was like I beat it and emperor crimsoned into the future by one scene).

Played this a bit last night, up through the CCTV tape puzzle in Case 1. Pretty cute so far. I think I'll like this.

I'm playing on Normal and not having any difficulty so far but I fear for as the game progresses. I don't have too much Picross experience. I've only played the Twilight Princess version that was distributed through Club Nintendo and even that I had to give up on as it got more difficult.

Music is awesome and most of the characters are pretty likable so far.

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The simplest way to think of overlap is that there are certain squares that are guaranteed no matter what the orientation is. Certain rows only have like 2 or 3 potential solutions and there are typically going to be squares that are the same in every potential solution.

If the row is 10 squares and you know that 9 of them need to be filled in then you can automatically fill in the middle 8 squares. You just don't know if the last square goes on the front or the end. It's the same concept for a 2 1 3 row or whatever. Try getting a piece of paper and plotting out all of the potential solutions for a row and see what overlaps. Eventually you can just do it in your head.

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yeah. I'm getting better but I still get a bit flummoxed.

anybody know what the update did?

I got this game thanks to this topic and zero regrets. I love how aggressively gay K.C. is. Just wish the Picross puzzles were harder.

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IGN gave this an 8, which is pretty good considering the site is generally unkind to mediocre when it comes to scoring AA games

https://www.ign.com/articles/murder-by-numbers-review

Just finished the first case. Very much liking this game.

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The puzzles definitely get much harder in case 2.

I wish there were a way to clear the board if you really messed up instead of unclicking each and every box.

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Underleveled posted...

The puzzles definitely get much harder in case 2.

I wish there were a way to clear the board if you really messed up instead of unclicking each and every box.

Yeah agreed.

Some other Quality of Life requests:

• a "re-do on easy" option
• something like a court record to look at the acquired evidence (as it is now, you have to "question" someone first"
• differently pitched text noises for each character (at the very least SCOUT should sound different)
• a soundtrack (maybe it gets unlocked at the end? here's hoping!)

You guys up for getting Honor and SCOUT into CB11?

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Finished the game this morning. I would have liked the plot/mystery stuff to be more involved, but I think they aimed for "Phoenix Wright Lite" and hit the mark fine. And, of course, I cannot possibly get enough Picross.

I rate it a solid Pretty Good

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Yeah, the writing is simply not as good as PW and that's okay.

I'm a bit ticked because I sucked at Chapter 2 and only got up to "A" rank. It doesn't seem like if you play on easy you'll get enough points to get the hidden "Scouts memory" scenes. In order to get to S I'd have to do the case over again. So from here on out I'm basically save-scumming, which makes me feel bad.

Just finished Case 2. The puzzles were definitely harder in this one, though not so hard that I had to drop the difficulty (though I could see it coming to that). Some of them I wouldn't have been able to solve without checking for rows and columns with available moves, which doesn't affect your score like other hints do.

Speaking of score, I hit S rank on the final puzzle of both cases so far, so it looks like you have to finish every puzzle on Normal with no hints to get S rank.

As for the story...
Unlike in the first case where I got the killer wrong (I thought it was John), I knew Kathleen would be the killer in this one the second we met her. The way she finally went down was very AA-like. In fact, it was almost identical to Richard Wellington. I also totally saw Honor's father and Detective Cross having been partners coming, but the scene was well-written nonetheless. Definitely liking this game.

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Woah the themes in Case 3 kinda came out of nowhere. Not in a bad way, but stuff that's not often touched upon in gaming, especially relatively light-hearted ones.

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Just got to the part where Ryan was arrested. Good riddance. Even as a character who we were obviously supposed to dislike he was particularly detestable.

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Slowed down on this to replay Nier Automata and start New Horizons

Also the picross just got too hard and now I'm playing on easy and it's too easy, so I'm a bit frustrated

I can solve basically any puzzle that gives me a free row/column at the beginning or gives me a large overlap. I still don't really get the adding strategies.

This is how I do it. I'm not sure if it's THE most strategic or efficient way, but it gets the job done and I've yet to come across a puzzle I couldn't solve in this game without using hints that lower your score.

If you press the Y button, it lets you "mark" a square withing filling it in or x-ing it out, so that way you can keep track of what squares can/must be filled in in rows and columns.

Let's say you have a row of 10 with the configuration 4 4. Start from the left and fill in squares as such, with 0's being "marked" squares and -'s being squares left blank.

0000-0000-

Now count from the right. Do not mark. Instead, fill in any squares that would be filled in from both directions. Now go ahead and unmark any marks that didn't get filled in. Your row should look like this, with F representing a filled square:

-FFF--FFF-

However, you can ONLY fill in squares that get marked from both directions in the same segment of the configuration. So if you have row of 10 that has a configuration of 2 1 3, marking from the left would look like this:

00-0-000--

If you count from the right, the third square from the right would be filled in. Now if you skip the next one and count the 1, it would seem as if you should fill in the fifth square from the right because it is marked from both directions, but that's not necessarily true because they don't overlap in the same part of the configuration. In fact, in this case, that third square from the right is the ONLY one that can definitely be filled in without any other information.

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Underleveled posted...

Just got to the part where Ryan was arrested. Good riddance. Even as a character who we were obviously supposed to dislike he was particularly detestable.

Just to add to this, I'm torn on whether we're going to see him again or not. It feels very early in the game to be writing off a major character like this, especially mid-case, but his arc feels complete, as does Honor's arc with him.

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Just beat Case 3. Only got an A ranking and not an S. Not sure why.

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Seems like only the two of us are continuing to play this, but oh well.

There's been a nice escalation in each of the cases in terms of drama/tension, but I still feel like the writers here don't quite know how to build up to a really powerful conclusion/reveal. The game is good at writing about Honor's relationships/trauma and at individual voices, but when it comes to the mysteries themselves and the reveals they fall a bit short.

That being said, i have to remind myself to not just compare this to AA and DR, because those games are really focused on elaborate schemes and ridiculous twists. This game is not about that.

I was joking in this topic title, but given how badly the year might get screwed up thanks to corona, this could conceivably be a top 10 game.

Partway through Case 4.

The skull puzzle took me three tries, totally clearing the board. I dunno why that one gave me so much trouble.

God I hate Ray. Fuck these tight-lipped cocky douches. The side characters in this one are not likable at all and half the main cast is missing thus far.

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Beat it.

Got an S rank on every case except an A on case 3 and still not sure why.

Good game, fun, cute. No masterpiece, but I'd play it again.

Or any potential sequels.

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