I am a very big fan of detective media, it's a genre I obsess over alot, and this game just does something right for me. I can see this being "A lesser mans danganronpa", but I would urge most people to allow it to stand on its own two legs.

It is flawed in alot of ways, the gameplay that does exist can feel a bit lacking in areas, mainly the case solving aspect, evidence feels like a afterthought honestly, and some of the challenges thrown at you are trial and error at its worst. Some solutions can feel contrived or convoluted, with the game not being clear of whats expected of your answers.

Despite all of that, the heart of this game is solid. I really loved the cast by the end of this game, the way it tackles ideas to do with mystery fiction from people who clearly know alot about the genre is something I wish to see more of, and it's music is honestly impeccable for the generally low number of tracks the game actually has. The mastermind was one of my biggest worries, but I ended up finding them to be one of the best aspects of the game, and the micro mysteries are overall solid little murder mystery puzzles.

I can see this game being hated by people downright, and I am not blind to its issues, its MANY issues, yet I can't help but respect it and loved it whole heartedly. I am a liar if I was to say I wasn't a bit sad to see the credits, knowing my time was over, but thats proof enough It was worth the time.

Real Saiharabros will recognize this main character. The one difference is this one can't speak english, as there only is japanese voice-over!!! yamete!!

Ok. This game naturally draws comparisons with the Danganronpa series, so let me mansplain why this one is more of a flop. Imagine the cast of characters is like an ice cream menu (yummy). In this game, when it tells you that you're getting strawberry and chocolate ice creams, you're getting exactly that. In the case of Danganronpa, you get that with added whipcream and sprinkles. Hope it helps.

I admit it did get better. I grew attached to these goofballs; this work has high highs and high lows, turning it unpredictable. If there is a sequel I will be there.

I really hope there’s another of this game. Many people say this is NIS’ take on danganronpa and yes, it is “create a cast where everyone is titled after their main character trait” but it goes its own way. You can tell the devs had fun crafting the worldbuild with all of their extra material and flavor text.

I enjoyed the quirky cast and learning their backstories and seeing their interactions.

The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired— I hated restarting dialogue when I failed a tactics section because there was no quick restart option. And many of those levels were tricky or plain frustrating. The deduction segments were also a little basic in a way where there wasn’t too much challenge to solve them and you could brute force your way if you didn’t know.

But I really want a sequel because they’re on to something with the tactics segments, they just need to polish it.

It fell pretty flat for me. The quality of the mysteries was never particularly high thanks to a combination of (1) the answers being painfully obvious and (2) relying on some extremely contrived and/or stupid actions to make them possible. The first case was probably the best in the game and even that wasn't especially good by the standards of other mystery games I've played.

Meanwhile the actual process of solving those mysteries really didn't add much. The strategy-esque segments were novel at first, but they didn't really contribute towards the mysteries themselves. All were pretty trivial to beat and only got easier as the game progressed. And the short length of each segment effectively means you're getting all of the relevant information about the case in the span of just a few minutes, further contributing to how easy the case it to solve.

The only real benefit to the strategy investigations is their aforementioned brevity. Rather than something like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa where investigating the crime is a huge part of the playtime, the short investigations let the game keep the pace moving at a very fast speed. The entire game only took me about 16 hours to complete. Cutting out the earliest portions (which are just introductions to the characters and setting) and the end (which is just summarizing all the earlier info to find the mastermind) there's only about 2 hours in between each murder. Which, as mentioned already, does severely limit their complexity but lets the game compensate for the lack of depth with quick pacing that helps keep the game refreshing.

The characters are a very mixed bag. There are a few pretty good ones, but the bulk of the cast are so one-note they make Danganronpa characters look deep by comparison. And while even the bad ones had their place, my interest in the characters was definitely propped up by a select few rather than the dynamics of the cast as a whole.

Really, Process of Elimination would suck if it were any longer. Very few things about it are particularly good and I doubt it will stick around in my mind for very long. But it escapes a lot of my ire by virtue of its brevity. The mysteries may not be great, but they're quick and simple. The characters might not be great, but they're easy to figure out and somewhat engaging to see. And while an extended length may have been able to fix these problems somewhat, what we have now is a game that feels more like a bite-sized mystery game. It might not be especially satisfying, but its easy to digest and offers enough to substance to keep your hunger for similar games at bay for a while.

I don't think I can recommend this game overall. But if you really are inclined to play it, I would suggest treating it more as a way to kill a weekend without needing to think about things too hard. It can probably fill that role well enough.

I cannot BELIEVE I've never heard of this game before. I went in thinking that this would just be a Danganronpa clone, but was completely blown away by how well-written, tense, and generally enjoyable this game was. The game's plot is extremely original, nothing like Danganronpa (aside from the closed circle murder aspect). Every second of it was a blast- it's rare for me to like every character in a game's cast, but I truly loved every single one of the Detectives.

The plot twists are incredible, the puzzle gameplay is fun and gets challenging near the end (i was running down to the wire in the later investigations), and the main character goes through an incredible journey of growth over the course of the story. I really enjoyed seeing him develop as a character and detective as I played!

The only reason I'm taking off half a star is because you can't save during the investigations, which really hindered me when I'd have to go do something in the middle of playing. I also had an annoying mishap early in the game where I returned to the title screen to check something, only to find that it had been three hours since my last save. Oops. For that reason, I think this game would have really benefited from an autosave function.

Other than that, though, I don't have any complaints! I am obsessed with this game and I hope more people play it. It's an exemplary mystery game and it's a crying shame more people haven't played it.

First things first, and this is a visual novel with a HEAVY emphasis on the novel part. There are traditional bits of gameplay throughout in the 'tactics investigation' sections but they are short and infrequent. Be prepared to read your ass off. Really, the lack of a thorough editing pass to shave off fully 25% or more of the word count in most sections is the greatest fault of the game – I suggest adapting to it instead of frustration but that's a personal matter. The wordiness isn't always negative though; where many other VNs i've played perhaps cut too much from pivotal scenes where the pacing NEEDS to slow down and gain gravitas and detail, PoE at least gets to put a lot of weight behind those scenes, and that helped build its relationship with me a lot.

Similarly, the art style and presentation of characters with the (nearly) fully-voiced Japanese lines is sublime. Even with over-exaggerated localized dialogue quirks you may expect from this kind of thing, just about every character won me over eventually, despite my initial hesitancy on many of them. The joyous character art and VA delivery definitely helps tide you over while the prose slowly works its way in. The main exception to the cast quality is the murder robots, which are very weakly executed overall, but even as someone who should be allergic to that kind of ... machina ex machina, they were managed OK enough that I didn't feel that they were a huge stain on the work. Even after I finished reading this mammoth thing, I was compelled enough by my favorite characters to replay the investigations for bonus scenes and the extra scraps of dialogue that come from the fact that basically any of your detectives can do any investigative action and they all have their own lines for each one.

The game will win zero originality awards, and yet where it could have been banal, hacky, and derivative, I feel it ultimately was written with love, wit, and deftness. There ARE original ideas, and what's more, the shortcomings of its forebears are recognized and often resoundingly corrected. The execution with this tempering ends up being as solid as a brick shithouse. This is something that really warms my heart about PoE: that it is clearly responding to its influences in this niche field, (relatively) big and weighty author names like Kodaka and Uchikoshi, and loves their work like I love their work, but affirms my conclusions on the attached games' structural shortcomings. Even with a clearly strained budget in places – you're going to see sooooooo goddamn much of a certain L-shaped hallway background with some different lighting fixtures, there are some puzzles that keenly feel like they were made for a breakout minigame section that isn't there, et cetera – there's good priority on which parts of the work have the biggest impact from dev resource allocation.

The tactics investigations are low key brilliant. They're never too long, so if you got way ahead of the mystery-solving, you're not too far from getting to prove it and progress; but they also present evidence and info in a novel-enough way for folks behind on the mystery-solving to follow along with the ride while they catch up. Additionally, controlling a whole group of detectives actually sells the feeling of you putting the case together as a team, and dovetailed well with the protagonist's confidence arc. Plus the sections have novel enough mechanics for it to not feel like completely unrelated, derivative minigame filler.

Finally, I think objectively this is more like a 4 or 3.5 but I fell in love with it so fuck the scale. The main reason I have to rate this so highly is that it has the best macro plot & villain resolution of any of these type of games I've played – there are so many of these psychologically-minded VNs where the ultimate conclusion is just "some people are Evil Ahhhh Oooohhhh!!! Mean!!" and that's THE inciting incident. Even some of the best ever are marred by this anticlimactic cop-out reasoning. PoE doesn't not have some of this in a character or two, but ultimately the villains' motivations are really not that and are instead rooted in some complex and fucking real places with the bonus scenes actually giving you further shading on them. And after having just played Kodaka's RAIN CODE a month or two back which is another incredibly back-and-forth-quality-level script of his style, I feel pretty confident in saying that yeah, the folks on Process of Elimination truly surpassed their influences in some really vital ways. It may be long-winded as fuck, but that wind is astute and confident. Also I wanna slap Doleful Detective's gay little ass fr

I loved this game so much more than I expected to. It's relatively short, and the gameplay is fairly basic outside the novel part, but I'm perfectly fine with treating this as a regular VN with a few extra sprinkles. I loved pretty much every character from the start, and aside from the very first death each one really felt like a loss to me. The dialogue oozes with charm, and the development of the MC alongside best girl was really enticing, making it really hard to put this down sometimes. And, even though it all happened pretty quickly, the messaging throughout the final reveal definitely resonates. I would love to see a sequel that puts more emphasis on the gameplay, since I think there's plenty of potential there.. and I just want more of this world, honestly. 9.5/10

Compared to other VNs I've played(Danganronpa, YTTD, AI: the Somnium Files), it definitely wasn't as good but that doesn't mean it was bad.

Really, the only negatives I'd give it(and they're more YMMV) are that the gameplay is very minimal, even by visual novel standards, and that the characters didn't really make much of an impact on me.

That being said, Armor Detective is best boy.