izigame.me

A live-action mystery game that mostly gets away with it. The acting and directing is on par with a filler episode of a mystery-of-the-week tv show, and the english dub is several notches below that. Which is to say it's still miles above the average videogame presentation. There are actual actors, emoting clues to their motives with their actual faces! Amazing! Props jammed into every corner of the frame, some of which are clues! Wow! Mood-setting techniques more subtle than 'play sad music when the guy is sad'! Outrageous!
It takes some lengths to hide that most of the action takes place in
A) One big house
B) The same house with different colour grading
C) Hallways
It looks budget-conscious, but it doesn't look cheap. It's fiiiiine.
Mystery-solving is broken into three parts: deduction, where you snap clues together to make hypotheses; reasoning, where you speak with an imaginary version of your sidekick about your discoveries; and denouement, where you gather all the suspects in the drawing room and catch the killer. This mostly doesn't work. Splitting the mystery-solving into three sucks drama out things that deserve to be dramatic -- a deduction that would be a stunning reversal in real time lands with a muted 'hum, interesting' in Abstact Brainspace.
This cerebralness extends to other parts of the game, with sometimes weird consequences. The denouement scenes love to hit you with one psychology-based line of argument ("He couldn't kill him because he's his father!") and one evidence-based line of argument ("He couldn't kill him because he can only lift 40kg and the murder weapon weighed 45kg!") and then pour scorn on you if you pick the first one. Which fits the just-the-facts-ma'am tone of the story, but might leave you wondering if psychological evidence is really less valid than some treble-decker jenga tower of reasoning built on one ambiguous datum.
At one point a character expressed concern for Haruka, and I went though a loop of "Wait wait wait, which suspect is Haruka, wait no Haurka is me." The protagonist is such a pared-back deducing machine that I had forgotten she had a name.
The quality of the mysteries is... pretty good. Nothing reaches the mad heights of a great Phoenix Wright/Danganronpa case, but nothing hits the miserable lows of a bad Phoenix Wright/Danganronpa case either. It's very consistant! (Except for a bit where it repurposes the deduction mechanics for a Taisho-era escape room. That was a weird experiment that didn't entirely pay off. And the mystery author seems entirely uncredited. That's weird too, right?) It also does an excellent job of stringing mostly self-contained mysteries into an ongoing story that feels more like a long, twisty movie and less like seven episodes of a television show.
Buy it if you like mystery games but think they should be more thoughtful logic-crunching and less courtroom theatrics.