When I got to the end of this game’s tutorial case, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play the whole thing. I didn’t know how many cases awaited me, but the Ace Attorney Trilogy collection had 16 cases and went for $30, so five seemed reasonable, given this one’s visibly lower production values and $10 price tag. (I should also add that this game’s first case is significantly shorter than Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney’’s tutorial.) But I wasn’t sure I could stand four more cases of that gameplay. Chase consists almost entirely of memorizing clues and watching the characters figure out their significance on their own, quizzing you not on your problem-solving skills but on your knowledge of trivia like characters’ names. It’s broken up by a few hidden object puzzles, but only one of them has any kind of penalty for an incorrect answer (which is, hilariously, an instant game over). I wasn’t a fan of the writing, either—the main investigator seems deliberately designed to be as unbearable as possible, and while I understood it was just a starting point for his development, that didn’t make his dialogue any more fun to read in that first case. And the rest of the dialogue was a repetitive slog too! When the case’s (admittedly surprising) cliffhanger hit and the opening credits rolled, I was considering putting the game down for good.

And then it turned out those were the closing credits. That was the entire game.