It's a shame, if somewhat unsurprising, that Square Enix completely failed to promote this game, especially in the west, as well as quashing videos of it by would-be fans.

"Narrative mystery game" is a genre with a lot of competition in my recent memory, but it distinguishes itself with its comparatively down-to-earth tone, which is reinforced by its use of live action performances. I was quite impressed by the story.

The actual interactive mystery solving bits were hit or miss. There were a lot of points - possibly translation issues - where it wasn't clear what an option meant, which made it hard to follow the logic of the case the way the game expected.

The mechanics were a bit simplistic too. It mostly consisted of throwing stuff at the wall and having the game generate ideas for you to accept or reject - and as said, that was sometimes tricky for seemingly unintentional reasons. There were a lot of blatantly pointless dialogue choices too.

Still, I can enjoy a good marginally-interactive narrative, and the presentation of it all - including both performances and UI - was very nice. The music was quite memorable as well. The game certainly deserves a better chance than its publisher gave it.

Oh, I should also point out that I turned off the dub after five seconds. It sounded like a bored dub of a foreign movie on a cheap TV channel. So I don't think that was very good, but I played without it and enjoyed the Japanese performances with subs.