You see, I play games to relax. I play games to feel smart, to feel a false sense of power, or to have a story told to me that makes me feel I’ve learned something. And mostly I play games to feel that my leisure time has not been wasted. Lunar Lander Beyond is based around the premise that frustration and failure are valid recreational activities.

I reject this idea. Utterly.

The central notion of the game is that you are in charge of a spaceship that must navigate various 2D space landscapes, collecting power-ups, refueling and repairing your ship, and achieving whatever other arbitrary objectives the game throws in your way.

You have several enemies, such as time trials, running out of fuel, and touching any other freaking object in the known universe (which will damage or destroy your ship). The two big enemies, however, are interia (your ship will continue moving in whatever direction you thrust until you try—and fail—to reverse the course) and gravity (even if you are in deep space, you will be pulled “down”). One of the early power-ups you collect will allow you to stabilize your ship, but only at the cost of fuel.

It’s like…imagine if you played Pac-Man, but the walls were electrified, so that if you ran into a corner, you didn’t just stop, but exploded at every instant.

Lunar Lander Beyond attempts to add in an experience system where you can modify your ship via pilot experience and the ability to upgrade the system, but these are LIES. The entire game is based around the idea that you are going to fail and fail again until you finally agree that failing is fun and that you are smart because you enjoy failing.

I urge you to reject this premise.

You are the player. The games exist for you, not the other way around. You are the person paying money for these games. Just because a game is listed as “retro” and a “reimagining” doesn’t mean that you need to accept the idea that you need to devote any amount of your time to “solving” the simple problem of a game that is masochistically difficult. You are a beautiful, valuable person. You deserve better than a game that will treat you like dirt just because you have a Nintendo Switch and 30 minutes to spare. There are multiple difficulty settings, but they do little to mitigate the pain.

That said, Lunar Lander Beyond does have its bright spots. It performs wonderfully on the Swtich in both docked and handheld mode. In terms of design, the game looks good; the ship and level designs have a cute, retro feel. There’s a genuine effort to make the game feel like a modern reboot while keeping retro elements like clean level design, with lots of colors. It also makes some surprisingly inventive design choices that may keep pushing you to see what’s next.

Perhaps more importantly, the between-mission commentary with your AI and other pilots uses humor to underline how insanely difficult the world of this game is, with the absurdly low percentages of pilots who manage to survive and have any kind of career. Lunar Lander Beyond knows it’s difficult, and it wants to taunt you into rising to the challenge.

I get that there are people who look forward to incredibly difficult, repetitive games, and who have the mental acuity and physical reflexes to handle them. I am not one of them. If you are, have at it.

The post Review: Lunar Lander Beyond (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

In terms of this game, it turns out to be the correct take.

Saviorless starts as a platformer. Your character, Antar, jumps, pushes, and pulls his way through a side-scrolling, puzzle-laden landscape as he attempts to follow the Radiant Heron to the Smiling Islands and become a Savior. Sounds nice!

It’s all rendered quite beautifully in a silky-smooth style that reminds me of Edward Gorey illustrations with the texture of medieval woodblock prints. There are ways to fail and there are ways to die, but, for the most part, it’s relaxing fare to puzzle the ol’ noggin.

Then that stops. Abruptly.

When the eldest narrator falls asleep, the young‘ns take it upon themselves to narrate the tale from the perspective of Nento, a mule-faced hunter whose relentless pursuit of the island is marked by violence, violence and… (checks notes) violence.

This detour also causes Antar’s tale to change as well. What was once a slow-moving puzzle platformer starts to add in elements of timed trials and button-mashing combat. One mistake—a mistimed jump or simply running out of time—means you’ll have to restart a section (including dialog) until you get it perfect. Once Antar arrives on the smiling islands, he discovers that combat puts a clock on his life; killing enemies gives him some life back, but he’ll still have to hurry to beat both the enemies and the environmental puzzles before he dies and must do it again. And again. And again.

It’s extremely stressful.

Add to this that each level has six page pieces you can collect by exploring the world. Some are obvious, others require you to find hidden crawl spaces or backtrack to capture. If you find all six you can trade them in to the writer of your tale, who will give you a reward. If you don’t have them all, he will offer you the opportunity to replay the entire level to find whichever pieces you’re missing. Oh, and if you do find a piece, but die before completing that section, you have to capture that piece all over again.

Did I mention this game becomes stressful?

Figuring out what you’re supposed to do on a level tends to be fairly easy, but managing to do it exactly right while floating monsters are exploding in clouds of blood around you is not. Casual gamers beware, but those who enjoy finding the precise way to fight and win will find a lot of enjoyment here.

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It’s fine.

The characters run at each other inside of the battlefield—which is defined by a light blue shield—centered around scenes from the show. In fact, the story mode of play makes a big deal out of recreating scenes from the series, but in a way that assumes you know who these characters are and are excited about fighting with them, or against them.

For me, it was all kind of a blur as they dramatically introduced “Blizz-blam, Princess of the Seven Keys of Fintoozler” as my next opponent.

The story revolves around a high school student who eats a cursed finger (maybe), and this is bad, but then the one dude who’s supposed to kill him (maybe?) decides that because he’s so good at the punching that they shouldn’t kill him, he should kill monsters. Honestly, I made a lot of use out of the “skip” option when the story part came up. I’m old now, and my interest in games based on shows about teen boys punching things is at its nadir.

The story mode of Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash isn’t hard at all. After finishing the tutorial and moving on to more missions, I completed almost every level I played with an “S” rank, simply by mashing buttons. Early on there are challenges where you have to pull off combos solo or with your AI partner, and these were, well, mostly annoying because I had no idea how to do it. Honestly, this was the hardest part of the game: I’d have defeated the enemy several times, but the level won’t end until you pull off a particular combo/event, which is troublesome because the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining how to to pull them off.

In terms of tone, the game reminds me of the teen kids I see in parking lots with skateboards, swearing to their friends that this time, they’re going to pull the trick off. No, this time.

And of course, it comes with the standard health/mana meter. Oh no, sorry I’ve just been handed a note which reads that it’s not “mana,” it’s “cursed energy,” presumably from this finger he ate? I think?

Oh right, playing with partners. I gather this is part of the show, because when you finally manage to pull it off, it’s pretty cool. There’s also a Fire Emblem-esque metric where, if characters fight together, they can increase their relationship/trust levels. You can also unlock and purchase (using an in-game currency you earn by fighting) new outfits, poses, and weapons.

And if you’re a person who enjoys this show/game and knows other people who do, you can fight in multiplayer battles.

Look, I watch anime, I know that this show is popular. Hell, they made a game out of it and it got ported to America. I have no doubt that there are a lot of people who are very excited to play a fighting game set in this world.

But if you’re not, there’s very little to recommend. It’s not a Street Fighter where the insanity of the characters is part of the charm. (A Hollywood Star fighting a four-armed demon? That’s just going to attract my interest.) All of these characters dress in black school uniforms, and the monsters they fight are just kinda gray blobs. I’m sure the reason they need to fight these blobs is explained in the interstitial scenes, but those go on and on (probably to please the fans). Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to sit for a slideshow recounting the plot of a show that the game assumes I’ve already seen and am invested in.

So, in summary, Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash is based on a very popular show about a guy who eats a finger and then beats people up. If you’re a fan of this show, you’ll probably like this game. For everyone else, it’s fine.

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I know, I know… “Another one of these games?”

Man, I love indie games. I love that there are people out there who will take an idea no one else has ever had, and put it out on a system people use for saving princesses and fighting robots. I especially admire the way they take a lack of resources, or a deliberately clunky interface, and creatively turn that into an asset with visual panache and an unusual vision. And One Night: Burlesque has that in spades.

It’s a short game. You can finish it in a couple of hours. Also, it’s not much of a game; it’s fueled mostly by dialogue as you interrogate potential suspects, and there’s barely any element of chance in interactive parts.

But it’s done in such a weird way I couldn’t help being compelled by it.

One Night: Burlesque is told in a series of still frames that are lightly animated; the camera will move over a close up of a dancer to indicate movement, and characters will abruptly change their posture to indicate a change in mood. Text will appear abruptly, often as a character’s intrusive thoughts, and visual effects like color separation are used to indicate mental states. It all reminds me of something you’d see on MTV’s Liquid Television; low budget, but interesting.

It’s tempting to call One Night: Burlesque a visual novel, though it’s strikingly different from many games of that genre. Your choices don’t change the story much (though they will have an impact), and no matter how you question everyone, it won’t change the path of the tale, just how you perceive it.

As for the bits that are interactive, they’re mostly made of awkward interactions (intentional, I assume) with the world: shaking a pill bottle, making a cocktail, trying to get a pill in your mouth.

The other big one is when you use your psychic abilities (or psychotic breaks, depending on how you want to read the story) to read the minds of others. You’ll get flashes of their agitation, their memories, done in a very Lynchian style that fits in with both their emotional state and the protagonist’s crumbling sense of reality.

The line art illustrations are simple but evocative, something like a ’60s Playboy illustration—slightly naughty rather than erotic.

One aspect I really want to call out is the music and sound design. Combined with the way scenes are edited, they give every sudden reveal, every emotional breakdown, a deeper impact.

It’s blunt force, but it’s also—like the game itself—effective.

The post Review: One Night: Burlesque (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

It’s the lowest of low fantasy, where the enemies are not just the outlaws and wild animals you must defeat, but also hunger management, fraying relationships between the troops, and getting lost while walking, walking, walking across the various kingdoms. No one likes you—you are killers for hire, after all, with no loyalty to anyone but your team—but they need you.

In terms of gameplay, it works like this. After putting together your initial team of four players, you set off in search of a town where you can take jobs. Along the way, you can be attacked by thieves and wild animals, and perhaps come across townsfolk and refugees who also need your help.

All of this takes place in a large world map, with your team walking and leading their pack mule. Eventually they’ll get tired and need to rest, where you’ll need to feed them and eventually pay their wages. If you can’t accomplish that, the team will weaken and eventually split up.

Once you enter combat, Wartales becomes a turn-based strategy game. You’ll fight your enemies by moving your characters one at a time on a grid map, making use of their attacks and special abilities while your foes do the same. As your characters level up and gain new equipment, they’ll gain new abilities and specializations based on their skill tree. So, while you might have multiple rangers on your team, one could specialize in poisoning foes while another has the ability to throw smoke bombs to break up combat.

In addition, you can unlock special attacks and buffs by using “valor points.” These are gained by fulfilling combat conditions like attacking multiple foes at once, having team members move to support their allies, and rallying their forces.

In addition to combat abilities, your mercenaries can also have a secondary job like blacksmithing, thievery, angling (fishing), mining, and others that you’ll unlock by exploring the map. Each character can have only one job, though, and while you can select which job your initial team members can take, once you start hiring mercs to replace the dead or beef up your ranks, they’ll come with their jobs already decided.

Some of the benefits are obvious. Having a blacksmith allows you to make weapons and armor rather than buying or looting them, fishing provides you with food, and the cook can learn recipes to enhance the restorative effects of your food. Having a tinker on your team allows you to make objects to enhance your camp (like a hitching post for the mules or a better cooking set up).

As you start to personalize your team, outfitting them with better gear, they’ll also start to build relationships with each other, which will come up as dialogue options during camp. Successful characters will gain bonuses, but make a mistake during combat—like accidentally hitting an ally with an arrow or taking lots of damage—and things will turn sour.

While all of this makes for a nuanced take in a low fantasy setting, the Switch port of Wartales is unfortunately hampered by bugs. The game crashes frequently and often at key moments—while entering story missions or attempting to make choices that could affect the way the world unfolds.

Equally unfortunate is that the game autosaves at irregular intervals, meaning that once you reload the game, you might find yourself back at the beginning of a fight you finished half an hour ago.

There’s a lot of potential in Wartales. It’s a good looking game with a lot of room to flesh out a roleplaying experience to your particular taste.

You’re rewarded for exploring and adopting different playstyles, and having a character you’ve worked on for hours unexpectedly die in combat can be gutting. Especially when they’re gutted. The game has limited magic (healing potions and a ghostlike fog filled with spectral beasts), but dead is dead; when you lose characters, you’re expected to bury them.

But the crashing problem is far too frequent, and losing not only gameplay but the ability to complete key missions simply prevents me from enjoying the game. I’ve been patiently waiting for a patch to fix stability, and suggest you do, too.

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Deadliest Catch is a reality show about crab fishermen, and how brutal and dangerous the job is, all for something you might take for granted in your local supermarket. I have never watched this show, but from the commercials and “next on” ads I’ve seen, it paints a pretty grim view of the work; storms wracking the boat every second, injury and death around every corner. I’m sure it is thrilling, and can understand why it makes for good TV.

The video game adaptation has very bad graphics, janky controls, poor design, and is, worst of all, boring. In it, you take command of your trawler, and learn the step-by-step process of industrial crab fishing: finding a location, loading the trap, recovering the trap, and sorting the crabs. In the bonus stage (“land”), you also get to buy ship fuel. It’s as exciting as it sounds.

To start, you look at a map of the sea and figure out the best place to lay your traps based on the habitat. You sail there, then go through the laborious process of winching the trap into the loading pay, attaching a buoy, adding bait, closing the trap, launching the trap, then waiting for a bit until you recover the trap, remove the buoy, put the buoy away, empty the trap, winch the trap back into storage, and then sex the crabs.

Yes, sex the crabs. You can only sell large male crabs. Anything else gets you a penalty. You do this by selecting a crab then rotating it with the JoyCon sticks until you fill up the two circles that tell you its gender and size. Sort them into piles, then move onto sexing another crab.

Having returned the unusable crabs to the sea, you return to port to sell the rest. Now, do it again. It’s that much fun.

You can also hire workers to help you on the boat, allowing you to further automate already tiresome tasks. These brainless NPCs must be assigned to a task, and if you don’t assign them in the right order, they won’t address the problem themselves.

Visually speaking, the game just looks bad. Working on a commercial fishing boat looks grim based on the commercials, but the low resolution graphics and bad camera placement don’t help. Trying to winch a trap into position can be done from two controls, both of which have terrible camera angles, and you can only hope to pick one up by flailing around the general location of the cages until one of them turns white. Thankfully, this process is rendered so badly that they don’t even make you line up the traps to place them or store them. I can only imagine what kind of a nightmare that would be on graphics that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the ’90s.

The part of the game you do have to finesse is steering the boat. If you fish multiple locations, going back won’t automatically place you in the correct spot to recover your buoy (and there’s only one spot you can do that from). Sitting in the captain’s chair with two very tiny windows, you must adjust your speed and direction to bring them into range. You then head out to see if you did it right, and if not, well, it’s back to the controls to adjust it further.

It’s not that the game looks bad and simplifies an otherwise interesting task. I recently found a low-rent game about ship breaking to be oddly relaxing. But Deadliest Catch: The Game isn’t relaxing, it’s repetitive, finicky, and badly designed. I’m sure the reality show mines a lot of drama out of  the personalities of the crew (which is, after all, what reality shows are actually about). But in this game, you’re accompanied by dumb robots who can’t help but do what you tell them to do.

If this game was given away for free to promote the show would be one thing, but to expect someone to pay for a game this bad is laughable.

The post Review: Deadliest Catch: The Game (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Because we live in the future, the answer is now, finally, “Yes.”

In Ship Graveyard Simulator you play a white dude (you can see your arms) who lives in a village of brown people (you can see them) and whose job it is to ram sailing vessels into the ground, then break some of the parts, then sell them.

That’s it. That’s the game.

In some ways, this is the purest version of a crafting game I’ve ever seen, and I must admit the simplicity of it is very relaxing. You order a boat, climb on to it, and use your tools to break it down. You can either sell those component parts directly or, for more profitability, take on contracts and combine them into more worthwhile alloys.

As you go along, you power up your tool seller (why am I paying for a business I paid to increase?), your storage space (to achieve better alloys), and your barracks (to hire NPCs to more quickly strip the vessels).

The gameplay is very simple. You approach a component, and it tells you what tool (hammer, saw, blowtorch, etc.) you’ll need to break it down. Use that tool, collect the bits, fulfill requests, build better facilities, get bigger ships. You don’t break down the entire ship, although later in the game you will start to take apart the hull, and every component tells you what tool you must use to deconstruct it. Cleats and pipes need a sledgehammer. Other items need a power saw.

And then there is my personal Satan: the blowtorch. The blowtorch is by far the most difficult part of the game, as the items you use it on are mounted on the wall, which makes it hard to maneuver around. Also, to “cut” with the torch means to drag the tool along a narrow line. The controls aren’t really sensitive enough to do a slow, steady movement. It’s more like watching a small child color with a crayon, desperately dragging it back and forth.

Cutting with a handsaw can also be a pain, as the component will display how much of it remains to be cut. But if you end up with a stump attached to a wall, figuring out where to position your player so he can actually make the cut can be difficult.

Story-wise, there isn’t any. It’s not that the game is mindless, the point of the game is to be mindless. There are no enemies, there is no conflict (other than your profitability), and it is immensely satisfying to hit L several times to break up whatever it is on the ship. There’s also a lockpicking mechanism that’s straight out of, well, most games, that allows you to find bonus materials.

But the main appeal of this game is just beating the crap out of old steel hulls and selling it to others. The graphics are janky (circa ’90s), and there’s no world-saving plot, just an idea to make a buck doing an honest day’s work.

I found it oddly appealing.

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Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is the 16th game in a series that’s been running for 40 years. Set over the feudal period of Japan, you select a time frame, choose a region of Japan over which you will be the daimyo (lord), and try to consolidate power over your region (or the entire nation) through negotiation, subterfuge, and war.

The game’s tutorial, such as it is, presents you with an absolute firehose of choices that must be made. You have to appoint lords and sub-commanders to your castles and counties. For the castle your character controls, you must also tell them how to improve the territory (building farms) or your castle (adding a market or defenses against invasion).

Next you have to adopt policies for your kingdom, again assigning retainers. But your retainers are broken into ranks, and not every one of them can accept each task. For example, if you try to negotiate with another kingdom, that retainer will be tied up for months, leaving him unavailable for a sabotage mission.

Also, your retainers will frankly not shut up when it comes to suggestions of missions you can send them on. They were constantly interrupting me while I was trying to learn the interface and build a damn irrigation channel for my castle. Why do you want to attack this kingdom I’m barely aware of? How does this help?

The number of things you must keep track of is staggering. There are policies (which must have someone in charge of them), policy chiefs who oversee the kingdom (another retainer), diplomacy, covert actions, plans to develop towns, plans for castles, general territory goals, the labor available to accomplish all these, food, money and trade.

Then there’s war, which is sort of the calling card of feudal management games, and this is where I really started to hate Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening.

You win the game by convincing other territories in the region to ally with you or by going to war and capturing castles. Once you decide to march on a castle, you’re presented with a list of all your military forces that can be sent to attack the castle. All of them. How do you deselect some of them? Should you deselect them? Shrug emoji! Strictly by accident, I was able to send out a force of 6,000 to attack a castle defended by 2,500 and got wiped out. I retried it again using my entire army.

“Bill,” you might be saying, “Won’t sending your entire army out of all of your territories leave your territory vulnerable to attack.” Yes it will!! Hostile forces immediately moved against my lands, but I decided to let it ride just to see how the capture mechanic of my attack would play out.

In addition, even though my massive force did in fact capture the castle, afterwards they just kind of…hung out. Units started to die because they ran out of supplies. My reputation suffered as allied forces “failed.” How do I get my army to go home? The game didn’t tell me, and because this is a new release, there is no documentation for what I consider to be basic questions.

Let me stress, this was while playing the tutorial. I felt completely lost from minute one as I was overwhelmed by options and choices, and no sense to figure out what I was supposed to be doing to enjoy the game.

Even more aggravatingly, because Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is striving for historical accuracy, you’ll be periodically interrupted with updates about important things that had been happening at the time, even though they have nothing to do with the region you’re in. Imagine going out to do your laundry and suddenly you get a Star Wars-like crawl informing you that “Meanwhile, Lord Halcon continues to consolidate his forces on the Ice Planet of Zeist, thousands of miles away…”

Further, if you’re playing a Lord who was actually involved in something interesting, you get pulled into battles that have nothing to do with the game you were managing. Getting prepped for a war? Well, now you have to play a mini-game where you have to defend this particular castle, kill this particular lord, and defend this particular gate. Now, back to the game you were paying attention to.

I said at the beginning that I recognized this type of game from the ’90s. When they were on PCs. And because they came for PCs, they had a robust shortcut and command system. This is made absolutely opaque by the controls on the Switch. Your main control for commands is brought up using the Y button, then the left stick. However, to access some of your commands (like listening to your retainer’s suggestions) you have to hit ZR. This takes you to a drop down menu on the upper right hand corner where you select from a group of unhelpful icons. The X button stops and starts time, but it’s also the “yes” button for jobs and policies.

Using the sticks on the overworld map allows you to pan across the world, but you can’t zoom in using the standard controls. Instead, you have to select it from one of the ZR controls, at which point it’s stuck at that level until you change it again. This is especially aggravating during combat, when—at the default level—all you can see is a series of overlapping pixels representing the forces, with no idea how they’re doing until someone dies.

I understand that people like these dense, historical games. I also understand that people like games that have a dense variety of options. I came up playing Civ 2 on my Performa. But back when I was playing those games, I had a.) a keyboard and b.) a printed manual that was the thickness of a textbook.

I also appreciate that this is a game series that has been running for 40 years, and there’s probably a substantial audience that knows the game and has a great deal of nostalgia for it.

However, as a new player, I found it confusing rather than challenging, obtuse rather than detailed, and lacking a level of basic explanation necessary for someone who isn’t familiar with the series. Also, the controls are poorly-matched for the Switch, and the text was incredibly hard to read when I wasn’t playing the game docked on my HDTV. If this is a game you’re inclined to play, play it on the PC.

The post Review: Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Smile for Me takes place in “The Habitat,” a colony for unhappy people set up by Dr. Habit. Your goal? Make these people happy! And in this point-and-click adventure, your job is to walk around, find out what people need to overcome their sadness, and put a smile on that face! How sweet, right?

Uh… no.

Smile for Me manages to pull off a very difficult trick; it’s creepy without doing anything overtly scary. There are no monsters waiting to attack you in dark corners, no whispering children singing in the background, and no combat other than a game of Whack-A-Tooth. And even your main goal (making the other inhabitants happy) quickly causes the gear of The Habitat to shudder. Dr. Habit’s daily messages start to point out that it’s his job to make people happy, and his methods turn out to be very different from yours.

The game is, as I say, largely a point-and-click adventure. You run around the habitat, click on people to talk, and gather objects you’ll need to combine or alter to solve certain puzzles. Most of the solutions are straightforward (How do you get someone in another room to hear a confession? How do you convince a security camera that the guard is still there?), but others will require some of that old “well, let’s just offer every object to every person” magic to find the solution.

And you’d better move quickly because each day of the game has a time limit; you need to get into bed before it gets dark. If you don’t, Dr. Habit will take note and give you another kind of video.

Smile for Me has a ’90s pop culture feel. Sort of like something you’d see on Liquid Television. The disturbing parts are upsetting on the scale of a fairy tale, and almost all the parts (hand puppets, taped video, angular sticker-people) hark back to a younger perception of fantasy and reality. It has an unusual vision, and part of the creepiness isn’t that it’s random, but a just-out-of-reach sensation that somehow this all makes sense. That makes exploring, interacting, and understanding the path it’s taking, all the more engaging.

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Process of Elimination is one of these games. It’s a murder mystery that takes place on the island headquarters of a cadre of super-detectives who are being picked off by a sadistic criminal mastermind. You, as a rookie detective whom nobody trusts, must help the investigation, uncover moles within the group, and figure out how seemingly impossible deaths have happened.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now—the plot of this story is absolutely bonkers. Each of the detectives has a code name based on their personality, which can be, shall we say, extreme. One detective is a super-smart kid in a robotic wheelchair. Another is, himself, a serial killer who’s been dragooned into working with the law. Another wears a suit of medieval armor constantly. And then there’s the one detective who truly believes in you. She’s dead and is a ghost only you can see.

You wander around the mansion headquarters of this motley group—which is somehow filled with ridiculous death traps and hidden passages—leading to an even more bizarre plot about secret experiments on children and killer robot sentinels.

I loved it.

Because it’s a VN, there’s no need for you, the player, to try and understand this world, because it plays out in front of you and you just have to click “next.” There are decision points where you need to show off your detective skills (like who’s betraying the group). If you mess that up too many times, the game ends, but you can restart from a save point.

The other method of interaction is a turn-based strategy mini-game. In it, you’re presented with a grid map where you can move the detectives around to explore and uncover clues that will lead you to breakthroughs in your investigation.

In the mini-game, you’ll start with limited control of all the available detectives, but as you solve the initial points, you’ll gain the ability to direct others. Each one has different strengths, and by supporting each other they can solve high-level problems. But the mini-game has a turn limit! Fail to get all the answers before you run out of turns, and it’s back to the save file.

Process of Elimination is a fun game in the visual novel genre that requires the patience to sit through long stretches of text and a nonsensical world. If you’re looking for any sense of reality or interactivity, stay away. But, if you want a singular experience in a world you won’t find anywhere else, here it is.

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