Murder by Numbers

Nobody asked for a detective visual novel wrapped around a logic-puzzle engine. That’s exactly why Murder by Numbers is interesting. Developer Mediatonic—the studio most people know for the pastel chaos of Fall Guys—had a very different project cooking in 2020, and it’s the kind of odd-couple concept that only works if the execution is fearless. It often is, though not always.

The pitch: it’s 1996 in Los Angeles. You play Honor Mizrahi, the star of a hit TV detective show who, in the ugliest of ironies, becomes the prime suspect when her boss turns up dead. To dig herself out, she partners with SCOUT, a junked reconnaissance robot with a wiped memory and the emotional range of an eager golden retriever. Together they poke around crime scenes, grill witnesses, and—here’s the twist—solve nonogram puzzles to reconstruct evidence.

That last part is the whole gambit. Most narrative games hand you an abstract “investigate” button. Murder by Numbers instead makes SCOUT scan an object, and the act of seeing what that object is becomes a grid-based logic puzzle. Fill the cells correctly and a fingerprint, a weapon, or a torn photo materializes. It’s skeuomorphism as game design: the puzzle is the deduction.

The credentials behind the camera matter here. Character designs come from Hato Moa of Hatoful Boyfriend infamy, which tells you the tone leans knowing and campy. The score is by Masakazu Sugimori, who scored the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—and his fingerprints are all over the game’s swaggering, synth-forward energy. This isn’t a coincidental resemblance to Capcom’s courtroom series. It’s a deliberate homage, built by people who understand the source material at a molecular level. The critical reception landed around a 79 on Metacritic—respectable, but the number papers over a real tension worth unpacking.

• Two genres, one loop: A Phoenix Wright-style visual novel fused with nonogram (Picross) puzzles that stand in for evidence analysis. Neither is decoration for the other.
• A buddy-comedy: The Honor-and-SCOUT dynamic—weary actress, wide-eyed robot—drives the writing and lands most of its jokes.
• Four campy cases plus bonus chapters: Investigations sprawl across TV studios, drag clubs, and glitzy awards shows. High-scoring detectives unlock puzzle chapters that fill in SCOUT’s origin story.

The Gameplay Loop

The rhythm goes like this: read dialogue, walk a scene, spot something suspicious, and hand it to SCOUT to scan. The scan triggers a nonogram. Solve it, and you’ve “found” a clue that slots into your evidence log. Later, you cross-examine witnesses, catch them in lies, and present the right evidence to break their story—pure Ace Attorney choreography, right down to the dramatic pointing.

When this clicks, it works. There’s an obvious appeal in finishing a tricky 15x15 grid and watching a murder weapon resolve out of the pixels. The puzzles are the game’s mechanical backbone, and they’re well-built: fair, escalating, and satisfying in the specific way nonograms always are once you internalize the counting logic. For Picross devotees, this is that itch with a plot attached.

The problem is the friction between the two halves, and it’s the single most important thing to say about this game. Nonograms are a solitary, meditative activity. Visual novels are a forward-moving narrative. Bolting them together means every story beat can get paused for a five-minute logic exercise, and every puzzle run gets interrupted by dialogue. The game asks you to constantly switch cognitive gears.

Who does this frustrate? Both audiences, at different moments. Pure puzzle fans get extensive dialogue and pixel-hunting investigation segments between grids—they want more puzzles, less chatter. Visual novel fans hit the opposite wall: they’re locked into a mystery, momentum building, and then a mandatory puzzle stops the story cold. Neither complaint is wrong. The design serves a hypothetical player who loves both things in exactly equal measure, and that player is rarer than the pitch assumes.

The Writing Carries It

Here’s what saves the whole enterprise: the script is legitimately good. Honor is written as a tired, funny professional, not a bumbling amateur, and SCOUT’s earnest naivety plays off her perfectly. The banter has real timing. The 90s Los Angeles setting—drag clubs, TV green rooms, awards-show backstabbing—gives the game a specific, lived-in flavor that most murder mysteries skip. The cases embrace their own camp without winking so hard it becomes exhausting.

The mysteries themselves are the weakest structural link. They’re entertaining but predictable; seasoned mystery readers will often clock the culprit well before Honor does. The pleasure isn’t in the whodunit twist. It’s in how you get there—the character work, the interrogations, the comedic detours. Judge this as a whodunit and you’ll be underwhelmed. Judge it as a character-driven hangout with puzzles, and it delivers.

Interface and Onboarding

The evidence-presentation system is clean, and the nonogram UI is uncluttered and readable—critical, given how much of the game unfolds inside it. Onboarding is gentle: early puzzles teach the ruleset without condescension. The pixel-hunting in investigation scenes is the low point of the moment-to-moment design. Combing a static screen for the one clickable pixel is the oldest, tiredest convention in adventure games, and it’s here in full force.

The aesthetic is the easiest thing to love. Hato Moa’s character art is expressive and distinctive, the color palette runs bright and saturated in a way that sells the 90s fantasy, and the environments—for a modestly budgeted game—have genuine personality. This is a game confident in its own look.

Sugimori’s soundtrack deserves top billing. It’s catchy, energetic, and does the heavy lifting of keeping the puzzle segments from feeling like homework. A great score can paper over a lot of pacing sins, and this one earns its keep. On the technical side, there’s little to worry about by design: it’s a 2D game with no technical ambitions to trip over, and a game of this scope is light on hardware.

The platform split here isn’t cosmetic—it changes the feel of the core mechanic.

• Nintendo Switch: This is the natural home. Nonograms are a touch-native format, and tapping cells directly on the handheld screen is faster and more intuitive than any other input. It’s also the ideal commuter format—short puzzle bursts between story beats map perfectly to a bus ride. Docked play loses the touchscreen advantage and falls back to stick-and-cursor, which is serviceable but clearly the lesser experience.
• Steam (PC): Mouse-and-keyboard is a strong fit for nonograms—precise, quick, and comfortable for long grids. Where PC pulls ahead is the pixel-hunting investigation scenes: a mouse cursor makes scanning a screen for clues far less painful than nudging a reticle with a thumbstick. On PC, a mouse is the way to play.

Neither version is compromised. But the mechanic wants a pointing device, and both platforms provide one in their own way.

Murder by Numbers is admirable because it refuses to be embarrassed by its own weird premise. The nonogram-as-deduction conceit could have been a gimmick; instead, the writing and presentation give it a reason to exist. Honor and SCOUT are the kind of double act you’d happily follow into a sequel, and Sugimori’s music is the connective tissue holding two mismatched genres in the same room.

But be clear-eyed about the compromise at its center. This game asks you to enjoy two very different activities in alternating shifts, and your mileage will hinge entirely on how much you love the lesser half of that pairing. Love both nonograms and visual novels, and this is close to essential. Love only one, and you’ll spend real stretches waiting for the game to get back to your thing. It’s a smart, charming, flawed experiment—and for most people, that flaw is enough to make it a wait-and-see rather than a buy.