🕵🏽♀️🤖🌻👨🏼✈️🌐👠🎥❎
i started playing this b/c i’ve been interested in picross games, and the phoenix wright flavoring felt like a friendly enough entry point to get the ball rolling. it turns out i’m really into picross! something about the system feels like i’m casting a complex spell, or in the case of this game, mulling over the details of a murder investigation. it’s equal parts arcane & meditative.
while making my way though this game, i picked up super picross & pokemon picross, and they kind of made me realize how the structure of MbN doesn’t feel like a great container for the puzzles. bouncing back and forth between grids, point & click mechanics, and dialogue feels like it should be a great time, but it just ended up a bit of a slog. somehow too much story in between each puzzle to get right back into it, but also not enough to make me care that much. there’s cool stuff in the plot, like a tv detective falling into the real deal & discussions of gender between a robot and a drag queen, but i wanted more. it felt like the worst parts of an interruptive hacking minigame sometimes, and that wasn’t even during the actual hacking minigame!
the writing was earnest, but never threw me a real chewy whodunnit curveball. the puzzles were fun, but the color blotchy pixel art style meant i could never really make a visual guess towards what i was looking at. the character designs were? all over the place?? the game felt hard to put down at times, but hard to pick back up at others. i think i took a year long break before coming back to the second half!
all in all, i’m happy this game gave me the in for picross i needed. there’s a lot of fun genre blending going on here, i just wish it was strong enough in one area that i could be more on board for it.
i started playing this b/c i’ve been interested in picross games, and the phoenix wright flavoring felt like a friendly enough entry point to get the ball rolling. it turns out i’m really into picross! something about the system feels like i’m casting a complex spell, or in the case of this game, mulling over the details of a murder investigation. it’s equal parts arcane & meditative.
while making my way though this game, i picked up super picross & pokemon picross, and they kind of made me realize how the structure of MbN doesn’t feel like a great container for the puzzles. bouncing back and forth between grids, point & click mechanics, and dialogue feels like it should be a great time, but it just ended up a bit of a slog. somehow too much story in between each puzzle to get right back into it, but also not enough to make me care that much. there’s cool stuff in the plot, like a tv detective falling into the real deal & discussions of gender between a robot and a drag queen, but i wanted more. it felt like the worst parts of an interruptive hacking minigame sometimes, and that wasn’t even during the actual hacking minigame!
the writing was earnest, but never threw me a real chewy whodunnit curveball. the puzzles were fun, but the color blotchy pixel art style meant i could never really make a visual guess towards what i was looking at. the character designs were? all over the place?? the game felt hard to put down at times, but hard to pick back up at others. i think i took a year long break before coming back to the second half!
all in all, i’m happy this game gave me the in for picross i needed. there’s a lot of fun genre blending going on here, i just wish it was strong enough in one area that i could be more on board for it.