The real murder was the friends we made on the way
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:Steam,GOGFor:£12 / €12.50 / $15
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
The latter part is where the picross comes in. Picross is a logic puzzle of a sort you may have encountered and hated as a child. Cells in a grid are coloured or left blank according to what the numbers at the side of them suggest. If one clue says ‘5,4,2’, for example, you know the line has a block of five coloured squares, then a block of four, and then a block of 2, but with an unspecified number of blank squares between them. When you fill in the grid right, it makes some kind of picture.
Often with picross puzzles, and MBN is no exception here, you’ll have absolutely no idea what it is that you’re actually constructing a picture of. The reveal pictures do some extraordinarily heavy lifting - a Schwarzeneggerian amount, in fact - to convince you that the collection of vague squares you were putting together was actually a crumpled handkerchief or a sobriety medallion. For example, hazard a guess at what this picross, from a case where an aging TV host was murdered in his dressing room, ended up being:
Hahaha, fuck you, it’s actually a partially-opened briefcase.
But this isn’t MBN’s failing, so much as it is a hilarious side effect of the puzzle type itself (although if you get into it, you’ll find some picross puzzles can resolve into huge pixelart jungles where flowers are rendered in surprising detail, or abstract renditions of ballet dancers mid-twirl). Slightly more a failing of the game’s is that the controls are enough of a hair off comfortable as to be annoying. Your cursor will clip to a new square on the grid just a mite too easily, which is a real balls when you want to click-and-drag down a row of 12 black squares, but end up bouncing onto three adjacent rows on the way down, completely arsing up the puzzle. And there isn’t an undo button! Which is a rookie exclusion for a picture puzzle game, if you ask me.
The character designs are from the right intersection in the venn diagram of “realistic” and “ridiculous”, and most of them show that they’re more than a deliberate, stereotyped rip-off. Many of the interactions with them are actually funny, and peppered with SCOUT’s Saturday morning cartoon optimisms, like “just because everyone’s against you, doesn’t mean they’re right!” (which, like, I take issue with. Because sure, if everyone is against you it doesn’t mean you’rewrong, but you should probably still take stock of your situation as a whole). Despite not being fully animated, the interactions are remarkably expressive, especially thanks to the use of Phoenix Wright-esque screen-shaking emotional cues.
