2019
2007
2015
2015
2019
Beautiful setting, fantastic illustrations, but generally underwhelming as both a story and a set of mechanical interactions. Making explicit the implied meaning of the illustration you show the client is a bad move, both because it's hard to connect the ambiguous and sometimes arbitrary glyph with the definite answer and because letting the client interpret is a more interesting way to express their character. Either way, it feels like a tutorial but without the part where you feel like you've gotten an understanding of the mechanics by the end.
2015
Call me old fashioned if you must, but when I'm playing an investigation game, I would prefer to get the information I need while actually doing the investigation, not during the preamble where I'm sitting and pressing A while characters just poorly conceived enough talk just long enough that the fact that they're catboy Sherlock Holmes or a steampunk child genius stops being charming and starts being a little annoying. The actual investigations and trials can be very fun, especially the jury examination and deduction response mechanics, but I wish it wasn't so irritating to get to them.
This review contains spoilers
The compromise in favor of the idea that audiences need to shoot something in order to have a good time and the compromise that in order to talk about the idea of despair you have to have an explicit Despair Loving Terrorist Cell to justify it narratively (in the sense that Junko's fascination with despair doesn't need to be justified as a narrative choice and can just be because that's a fun theme to explore) instead of just doing No Exit on its own merits drag this one down, especially the 6th case. Hilarious character writing, charming and intellectually compelling dynamics, and solidly constructed murder mysteries are still good enough to get me through. Probably won't be continuing myself, a let's play is more likely.
2002
I find it much easier to get into steampunk clockwork stuff when it's the decaying relics of a guy's fascinations than the usual "isn't it epic to do adventure in a vaguely colonial context" stuff, and I absolutely would have gone on that train to go see the mammoths, being a high powered lawyer sounds unbearable.
I enjoy the basic premise of Jarmuschy conversation in a fantasy setting, but neither the potion making nor the characters really become anything above replacement level. Nothing is out and out bad, they're all cute little things that are fun enough the first time you talk to someone about their life story trading on the road or mix together a nice little orb drink but become really tedious at the point where you provide like 4 different potions for a big boss fight, going through the whole functionally identical process to get somewhat different orb drinks. It was made in a month as an event thing, it's going to be curtailed in some ways, I get it. The potions are very pretty, though.
2013