An incredible detective game. It's fully voice acted with really interesting characters. The biggest blemish on it is that the ending is pretty unsatisfying and feels a bit rushed, but it should speak to the quality of the rest of the game that I'm recommending it anyways. There's Layton-style puzzles, sure, but you also do real detective work. You speak to the cast about details of the crime and then make logical deductions about what is really happening, and let me tell you, some of the things you figure out are inspired, I was proud of myself each time I predicted something before I actually had to produce the proof and solve it.

Definitely worth checking out, it's a pretty short time investment. Eagerly awaiting the sequel.

This game absolutely shines through it's characters, voice acting, music and rooms that are all so wonderful and captivating. And the story is really quite intriguing. And it is absolutely worth playing this game for all of those things.

That being said... The investigation gameplay was a little bit disappointing to me. The way to get clues is often not to follow leads but to just poke around asking tons of question and clicking on everything that looks like you could perhaps interact with. And after gathering some clues, Grimoire will have a thought, which in the early game leads you to deduce why someone is suspicious. The first one that triggered for me is Hawkshaws, even though I had absolutely no idea what she was looking for. I had the relevant clue in my inventory but I didn't get any dialogue about it yet and had no idea it was related to her. And towards the end of that section of the game, I got the gist of the suspicion for other character but i was missing a piece to trigger the thought and I had no clue in which direction to look for what I was missing. I ended up using the hints quite a bit to send me somewhere relevant and make sure I'm not missing some random item in a room.

And for the most part, that's how the whole game went. I was curious to keep following the story but also a little disappointed in the ways I could interact with it. I still had a great time with this very charming game, but I will manage my expectations a little more when I check out more of these games.

Really fun murder mystery game