I love the concept of a picross / murder mystery game, and that more or less pays off with Murder by Numbers. It's a very solid picross game, notably with good controller support so I could play it on my Steam Deck. The puzzles are a little slow to ramp up in difficulty but they do get tougher towards the end. The only real gameplay mechanics aside from normal picross are having to scan the environment for clues, which unlocks new puzzles to complete and progress through the game, and a timed hacking minigame that comes up a few times where you have to rapidly solve multiple tiny picross puzzles on a timer, which is quite fun.
The murder mystery side of the game is more just a visual novel, you're not making any substantial choices or doing much real detective work here. The few times it does ask you to come to a conclusion there's no punishment for guessing wrong and you just get to pick again until you find the correct path for the story. That said, I found these parts of the game surprisingly charming. I'm not normally one for visual novels, but something about this clicked with me, perhaps just ingesting it in small bits between the puzzle sections. The story doesn't really go anywhere surprising but it's fun enough to be along for the ride, and the characters are pretty well done.
I do have two big complaints that kept me from enjoying this more. The first is the music situation. The soundtrack for the game is actually quite good, but it's also rather short, and only a smaller selection of music can be played during puzzles. This is also a minor problem because puzzles that come up in more tense situations still use the lighter, more upbeat music from earlier in the game. The bigger problem here is that there's only one volume setting for music, you can't turn off the music during puzzles without also turning it off during the story. I wanted it on during the story and thought it added a lot to those parts, but got really annoyed with it during the puzzles and ended up toggling it off and on throughout the second half or so of the game. You also notably can't open the pause menu once you're in a cutscene/dialogue, so even manually turning it on for story moments is out of the question unless you remember to do it before the end of every single puzzle. This was a pretty big annoyance over a roughly 40 hour game, and could be solved very easily I think, hopefully a setting gets patched in at some point.
The second complaint is about how the side content in the game is handled. There are four main cases you solve in the game, and for each one you get a rating that goes up as you solve the main puzzles without making mistakes or using hints. The higher your rating, the more side puzzles you unlock, and if you get an S rank and complete all the side puzzles for a case you get a bonus cutscene. These are actually quite important to the story and fill in some important info, which in theory I wouldn't mind because I'm playing this game for the puzzles and didn't mind doing the extra ones. This became an issue when I finished one of the cases, assuming there was just another puzzle at the end that would bump me up to S rank, but it turns out I somehow missed one. After you complete a case you cannot go back to the areas from it to search for more clues, the cases are almost treated like separate playthroughs and unless you manually make safety saves, you'll have to replay the entire case (a quarter of the main game) from the start to revisit any part of it. I ended up just looking up the cutscene I missed on youtube, and I only missed out on something like 2 side puzzles because of this, but it was very frustrating and easily avoidable.
Those rants aside, I had a really good time with this overall. It's easy enough to pick up if you're new to picross, but does provide some more challenging puzzles by the end even if the ramp up is a bit slow. The story is also fun and I think most people would enjoy it, so I'd still give this a solid recommendation if it looks interesting to you.
The murder mystery side of the game is more just a visual novel, you're not making any substantial choices or doing much real detective work here. The few times it does ask you to come to a conclusion there's no punishment for guessing wrong and you just get to pick again until you find the correct path for the story. That said, I found these parts of the game surprisingly charming. I'm not normally one for visual novels, but something about this clicked with me, perhaps just ingesting it in small bits between the puzzle sections. The story doesn't really go anywhere surprising but it's fun enough to be along for the ride, and the characters are pretty well done.
I do have two big complaints that kept me from enjoying this more. The first is the music situation. The soundtrack for the game is actually quite good, but it's also rather short, and only a smaller selection of music can be played during puzzles. This is also a minor problem because puzzles that come up in more tense situations still use the lighter, more upbeat music from earlier in the game. The bigger problem here is that there's only one volume setting for music, you can't turn off the music during puzzles without also turning it off during the story. I wanted it on during the story and thought it added a lot to those parts, but got really annoyed with it during the puzzles and ended up toggling it off and on throughout the second half or so of the game. You also notably can't open the pause menu once you're in a cutscene/dialogue, so even manually turning it on for story moments is out of the question unless you remember to do it before the end of every single puzzle. This was a pretty big annoyance over a roughly 40 hour game, and could be solved very easily I think, hopefully a setting gets patched in at some point.
The second complaint is about how the side content in the game is handled. There are four main cases you solve in the game, and for each one you get a rating that goes up as you solve the main puzzles without making mistakes or using hints. The higher your rating, the more side puzzles you unlock, and if you get an S rank and complete all the side puzzles for a case you get a bonus cutscene. These are actually quite important to the story and fill in some important info, which in theory I wouldn't mind because I'm playing this game for the puzzles and didn't mind doing the extra ones. This became an issue when I finished one of the cases, assuming there was just another puzzle at the end that would bump me up to S rank, but it turns out I somehow missed one. After you complete a case you cannot go back to the areas from it to search for more clues, the cases are almost treated like separate playthroughs and unless you manually make safety saves, you'll have to replay the entire case (a quarter of the main game) from the start to revisit any part of it. I ended up just looking up the cutscene I missed on youtube, and I only missed out on something like 2 side puzzles because of this, but it was very frustrating and easily avoidable.
Those rants aside, I had a really good time with this overall. It's easy enough to pick up if you're new to picross, but does provide some more challenging puzzles by the end even if the ramp up is a bit slow. The story is also fun and I think most people would enjoy it, so I'd still give this a solid recommendation if it looks interesting to you.