Chapter 0 (2022)
It starts off a bit too complex, I think– there’s the practice area where you get to click on things to investigate them, to read their descriptions, and the information given is a bit too much sci-fi worldbuilding that it makes you think the rest of the game is going to be like this. There’s a newspaper report even the protagonist finds boring, but after you’re done reading it, the game asks you a question about what you read. So it’s important to pay attention.
The rest of the game isn’t dull or overly complex at all, and the puzzling is a lot more forgiving than other games. You get asked questions to which you can, in the spirit of poker, check (less risky yes or no answer) or raise (more risky yes or no answer), and lose or win life point chips by doing so. There’s a correct answer in there, but you can get a few more points by figuring out the correct answer before the game tells you what it is. I thought it was going to be a lot more of, actual gambling, in a Kakegurui type highball, but it’s actually rather subdued and keeps to gently rewarding you for exploring and thinking about what you’re reading instead of going as fast as possible, or saying fuck it and guessing.
The points system lets you redeem rewards (including extra scenes) at the end depending on how well you played, which along with the reveals in the plot, encourages replaying. Which is rather rewarding with the plot reveals, because you’ll get things you didn’t see the first time.
So, anyway, about the characters! They weren’t joking about the lawyer being a Killer Lawyer. The coldblooded lawyer who kills people on the side, not for any real purpose or hatred really, but just because she wanted to. The first case is something she decides to pick up because she’s the one who did it, but the boyfriend of the woman she killed stupidly (understandably) picked up the gun and started getting arrested by the police for being a serial killer with five other victims.
The cops, who, without her intervention, would’ve shut him in prison or more likely deadly, torturous labor camps worse than the capitalist hellscape give-yourself-an-organ-transplant in order to get a job. Or maybe it would’ve been fine, because the district attorney had figured it wasn’t him after glancing at the case, though not without the trauma of being handcuffed and questioned for a few hours after having witnessed the horrible murder of your girlfriend. But that’s just what happens already. I guess it’s not nearly as bad as how bad cops don’t let you access your rejection suppresants so you die before your hearing in the jail cell?
So like… she murders people, but she also took a case she didn’t have to in order to save a random guy (from her own deeds). Maybe it was out of the desire to not get anyone else get credited for her perfect crimes, where (in this particular spree) she shot six people dead with one bullet each.
Speaking of which, the brown haired brown eyed female cop informs us of how every murder was of women with brown hair and brown eyes. The lawyer insists it doesn’t matter and maybe it doesn’t… or maybe the district attorney also has brown hair and brown eyes…
Anyway, after solving the first case, I put my laptop down and went ‘hmm… some nice thoughts to chew on about an asshole lawyer in hell’ and picked it up again right to Morgan confessing that she was the killer and had killed a fuckton of people. So.
Intuitively, she makes… faces… that felt kind of… odd… and she lies a lot. She hides her reactions frequently. There’s some justification about how unlike the police officers who love being friendly and working together, a coldblooded serial killer who knew the city from the inside would be more likely to be a third party working with the cops instead of a cop. I think this is decorating it a little too much; the cops murder people all the time and put them in mass graves, cover up their deaths, etc. It’s not like people get more moral in groups.
