Endwalker broke me on many, many levels. It's a beautiful conclusion to the main storyline of final fantasy XIV, and I loved every bit of it. It really ramps up the spectacle for the final chapter and there were many moments I was in awe at what the game ended up doing. And it. Did. Not. Pull. Any. Punches. It is both painful and beautiful in equal measure. I lost how many times it made me cry. It keeps up the quality of combat from shadowbringers, and I can't wait for them to add more in the patch content. If anything, I'm a little bit sad that there will be more expansions and that the game cannot get a definitive conclusion, but I'm happy how they pulled it off.

Been looking forward for Horizon 5 ever since its E3 showing, I haven't played a realistic racing game since I was very young, so this was practically a fresh experience back into the genre, and those trailers just somehow really managed to entice me and my friends. And I can say now that its out, I'd say it definitely gave me a lot to enjoy for sure. Horizon 5 is a gorgeous game, with loads to do, but I'll admit as I kept playing the more problems I was beginning to have with it as well as getting fatigued, so while I'm not technically done with it, I think I've played enough to give my full thoughts on.

I think where 5 shines the most is in its sense of discovery and the feeling of just driving around Mexico. It feels like there is always somewhere new to explore and with how pretty the game is, and how vibrant Mexico is, it always feels like the large world is begging to be explored just to see what there is, even if it is just to go sight seeing. And there is certainly loads of racing to do that is obviously very enticing and fun, and it is certainly a blast, I especially love dirt racing in this game because you get a look at the most beautiful locales that they managed to put into this game. But overall my highest moments in this game were often just driving long distances to a location and enjoying the sights as I drove along, it really captured the fun feeling of just being able to drive around while plowing through fields and destroying property for a high score. And some of the Horizon Adventure content is super cool as well, anytime you're racing something absurd like jet skiers or a train, or driving a parade float off a fucking cliff just for the hell of it, feels like a massive reward for just doing all the fun stuff that you can uncover in Mexico,

However not everything in the game reaches those highs unfortunately and its where a lot of my personal gripes arise. I do understand that this is a racing game so obviously there is a ton of courses and different races to be had, and they're obviously a lot of fun but after a while they really start to blend together for me. And that wouldn't really be a massive issue if so many of the Adventure missions feel like they were re-treads of the missions the game wants you to do in order to get the big spectacles to begin with. I feel like the game spends its most bombastic missions right at the beginning and it feels a lot more safe and also harder to unlock as you progress through them all. Obviously part of this is certainly a result of me playing the better part of twenty hours or so playing it straight, but I think my criticism would still stand even if it were more spaced out.

I think a lot of that frustration would be mitigated if the online was good right now as well, but holy shit it is terrible. I guess I should've guessed that it could've happened but the servers just don't feel like they're working, and they recently just optimized the game and reworked the servers at the time of writing this, and it feels like I've experienced more latency issues and bugs then I did at the launch of the game, which is disappointing and honestly killed my interest to finish the rest of the story missions right now. None of the bugs are game breaking or anything, but a lot of them are just obnoxious enough to bug me, like the map more than one occasion would just stop directing or misdirect me to a story mission and with how cluttered the map is, it could be kind of a chore to find the mission I wanted. I also think the music selection for this game isn't very good, but its also surprisingly limited, which is more of a nitpick then anything, but hearing the same like six songs on the classical station is just bizarre, they're classical songs and yet Microsoft of all fucking companies can't get the license for more then less an albums worth of tracks?

I know I've been pretty critical and honestly writing too much about a game that probably doesn't warrant it, but its mainly because when the game is great, its fantastic, but I honestly am not too keen on how it launched. Feels like it was a poor time to release it too, because Microsoft is now putting all their attention into the Infinite multiplayer like less than a week after this launched, really feels like this got shafted almost immediately. I think my thoughts could easily change as the game gets updated, but for now, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game a lot but it just misses that mark of me really loving it, at least for now. Here's hoping to a brighter future for it thought!

The influence this game takes from Ace Attorney is as blatant as it could be, and at first I was surprised by how well this game stacks up to the legendary source material. The dialog is witty and the art is amazing, but the cracks start to show when you reach the end of the game. Ace Attorney games have a proven formula for solid endings, setting up an emotional through-line in each of its cases which build up to an emotional finish. Aviary Attorney goes a different way, sneaking in little mysteries about the past which set the stage for an explosive finale. It’s not a bad strategy, but Ace Attorney lets you get attached to its characters for fifteen hours before the emotional punch, Aviary only gives you three. You hardly have time to get invested or understand those clues before everything you know is being upended and twists cause the plot to fly off the rails. If a twist happens before players have a good grip on the setting or characters, it doesn’t create the exciting sense of shock it’s supposed to, just a sense of confusion. For all its clever dialog and amazing visuals, a story can’t be recommended if it’s the textbook definition of a letdown.

Picross games are something that I’ve always considered as a minimum “good 6-7/10” gameplay experience for me. I like Picross, I could do hundreds of Picross puzzles without complaint. Hell, recently, I’ve been playing the Picross NP series, a collection of Super Famicom Picross games released through Japanese Nintendo Power back in the late 90s. They’re an inherently enjoyable way to relax for me, and at times, even manage to surpass that into fantastic games of their own, such as the Picross 3D series. Unfortunately, if you’ve already looked at my score for this game, you’ll have seen that Murder by Numbers is a Picross game that is not, at minimum, a good 7/10. In fact, it feels like an awkward mix of two games–an okay visual novel and an okay selection of Picross puzzles–which is then further marred by such a complete lack of quality of life features, resulting in an overall mediocre package.

To give a brief introduction, Murder by Numbers intends to be a hybrid murder-mystery visual novel and Picross puzzle game. In gameplay, this results in an experience that seems closely influenced by the Ace Attorney or Professor Layton series of games–you complete puzzles that turn into images representing evidence and objects, and then you use that evidence to progress the investigation through dialogue with other characters. There’s a total of four cases, each with its own mystery to solve and ~20 puzzles to complete for each case. To best explain my issues with the game, it is easiest to split the experience into the two parts it’s built out of–the story-centric visual novel sections, and the gameplay-focused Picross sections.

Murder by Numbers comes across as a very clumsily written game. It features so many strange storylines involving murder, government conspiracies, killer robots, insurance fraud, more murder, sexism, believing in yourself, abusive relationships, even more murder, etc. that it’s easy to wonder exactly what the through-line of the narrative is meant to be. When the game took itself more slowly, I would occasionally come across small conversations I found enriched my experience of the characters and its world, such as lighthearted moments involving a wayward tampon in the first case, an engaging emotional story with the lead’s co-star in the second case, and some talks on gender identity between a drag queen and a silly robot in the third case. Unfortunately, a bulk of the dialogue involves dull, easy-to-solve mysteries and a lot of writing about the lead character’s personal feelings which always felt like the writer was trying to tell me what her themes were meant to be rather than showing them through conversations between characters. By the time one of the major emotional plotlines involving the lead character’s previous marriage was resolved out of nowhere in case 3 and is promptly forgotten about, my attention started to waver, and the absolute mess of the fourth and final case’s plotline certainly did not manage to bring me back.

The story of Murder by Numbers isn’t great, but I don’t think that’s too surprising–this is a type of game I would expect to put a focus on its gameplay and puzzles first and foremost… which is why I feel like it’s a shame that I don’t think much attention was paid to this side of the game. When you’re not reading dialogue, the main gameplay consists of moving through different locations and using an “investigation” option to find items you can use as evidence or to spark dialogue with other characters–after you solve a Picross puzzle, of course. This investigation section is one of the game’s worst parts–unlike in Ace Attorney where you’re generally encouraged to find specific things you notice in the area, the backgrounds don’t actually have the items you’re trying to find, meaning you’re meant to scroll across the entire screen waiting for a red indicator to start glowing red. It’s incredibly tedious, and mostly just feels like a failed implementation of that very system from the AA games. Once you get into the puzzles themselves, any experienced Picross player is going to quickly realize how bare-bones they are. Aside from two puzzles, the maximum size of picross puzzles in the game is 15x15, and these puzzles involve no added mechanics from other games, such as Mega Picross. There is a small subset of “hacking” puzzles which involve 5x5 puzzles where you cannot use “x”s and have a time limit to complete them, but these go by quickly and provide no real challenge. This adds up for a total of 200 “easy-to-medium difficulty” puzzles if you do all the bonus ones–I’ll admit, even as a big Picross fan, I started to get bored of the puzzles by the end of the game. This isn’t an issue of too many puzzles (for instance, Picross 3D: Round 2 has ~350+), but rather a complete lack of added difficulty or new mechanics. It feels like a huge dump of time-wasting, simple puzzles without much thought put into them, which is even more exhausting when the game continues to push and pull the player from dialogue to puzzles for a disjointed gameplay experience.

For a bit of housecleaning before I get to my final section on some of the game’s biggest issues, here are a few somewhat unrelated topics! The character designs are all rather good, though the expressions often feel rather limited in terms of emotions–for instance, the main character’s “sad” expression looks so incredibly pained that it adds an odd tone to emotional scenes. On the other hand, the pixel art for completed puzzles looks really really awful, to the extent where it honestly feels like no artist touched them at all. They look like full-size images that were compressed down. Even when the game told me what an object was, there were times when I couldn’t see the object in the art itself. And finally: the music.. is nice! It’s got some chill songs. I liked it. It’s nothing too special but it’s good.

Alright, so basically everything from before now was the preamble, because now… I need to talk about some jank. Without the complete lack of quality of life in this game, I would probably be nice enough to give it a six out of ten, or hell, even a seven, but instead, I have this wonderful bullet-point list of issues I came across… while playing Murder by Numbers.
• Movement when doing Picross puzzles is very awkward–my cursor would often move faster or slower than I intended it to, and the cursor itself loops across the screen, something which is rather uncommon for the genre in my experience and took a while to get used to.
• It’s incredibly easy to accidentally mark off squares you’re not intending to mark off due to misread inputs. I have many, many videos of this, where a mark my cursor is nowhere near will appear or disappear for no particular reason. If I don’t manage to notice this early, I may continue to try solving the puzzle even after the game’s faulty controls had marked off a spot incorrectly, causing problems down the line.
• There is no puzzle reset button or ability to quit a puzzle after it starts. If you accidentally restart a puzzle you’ve already done you’re forced to complete it. I seriously cannot believe this one, there were multiple times where I started a bonus puzzle on accident and just had to complete it again for no reason, or when I felt like I wanted to restart a puzzle but couldn’t, instead having to manually remove my own marks. Like, seriously… no option to quit puzzles at all. You have to go back to the title screen, which doesn’t work for bonus puzzles since the game does not always autosave when completing them.
• Reading through dialogue is awkward for a multitude of reasons. It’s easy to accidentally skip dialogue because some lines “auto-skip” once they’re entirely on the screen to represent a character being cut off by the following line, which means if you click “a” to make dialogue full-length to read it easier, you may end up skipping entire lines by accident. It’s easy to accidentally loop dialogue because there’s no pause between the end of dialogue and the dialogue choice screen, meaning my instinct to click “a” right when dialogue pops up often ended up causing me to loop it instead. There’s no dialogue fast forward or skip button at all, meaning if you accidentally loop dialogue or choose to repeat a case, you have to click through it again. And finally, there is no backlog, meaning if you happen to accidentally skip dialogue you can’t loop… well, you can’t read it anymore! It’s gone!
• Some characters only react to some evidence in certain locations despite that not being something that should matter in those cases. I think this actually might have been a bug involving one character showing up in two locations in case 2 when no other character does this, though. Either way, it’s jank!
• To get an S rank on a case (which you need to unlock all bonus puzzles and get some bonus story content), you need to do every puzzle in the level, but some puzzles are missable (it may only be puzzles in case 3 but I’m not entirely sure). If you miss a puzzle, the only way to get the S rank is to do the whole case again, from the start, and since there’s no dialogue skipping option and no puzzle skipping option for puzzles you’ve already done… well, I’m sure you get how annoying that must be for someone who misses one easy to miss puzzle in a case and misses out on that S rank.
• Game has occasional visual bugs and glitches. It’s really not a big deal but it adds onto the jank, seeing visuals or cursors show up where they’re not supposed to.
• Constant screen flashing and shaking during conversations that can’t be turned off. Does this count as jank? It was extremely annoying, considering the game includes sound effect subtitles for accessibility, it’s a shame you can’t turn off the constant flashing for similar reasons.
• One of the main characters is a gay dude and I don’t even like him. How do you mess that up?
Honestly, there are probably some more I forgot about or didn’t think about. I’m not going back to find out!

Murder by Numbers is, obviously, a disappointing video game for me. I was pretty interested when I first saw trailers for it because it’s combining two things I enjoy (murder-mystery visual novels and Picross) into a complete package–but… well, it just doesn’t work. The two halves don’t flow together well, and they’re stitched together with copious amounts of jank and bugs. It’s not a bad game but… god, it’s just not good either. Hey, did you know this studio’s next game was Fall Guys? Like, what the hell? That’s so weird. Fall Guys. Huh!