Apollo Justice on Steam & Storyteller's Festival
And a quick overview on my plans for February
Happy Mystery Monday!
Community News
Mystery Gamedev reached 200 members on Discord!
Kinjo (that’s me!) presented his talk on Mystery Visual Novels at the online visual novel conference VN;Conf 2024 —we’ll investigate this more in next week’s post!
Jaqui, creator of psychological thriller mystery visual novel Boyband Hell also gave her own talk at VN;Conf, and gave me valuable feedback on mine!
Sci-fi/mystery visual novel Anamnesia is now available to wishlist on Steam!
Methods: The Detective Competition is now on Google Play and the App Store!
The Storyteller’s Festival 2024 is live on Steam, featuring a number of whodunnit and thriller games on sale from members of our community (and many others)
New Releases on Steam
Here are 3 hand-picked mystery games that released last week on Steam:
Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Trilogy — “Join rookie attorney Apollo Justice and his mentor, the legendary Phoenix Wright, in this collection of 3 games! This title features the 14 episodes of "Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney", "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies", and "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice", and the 2 previously DLC-only Special Episodes for a total of 16 episodes!”
Zarathustra - Cybergeddon — “Take on the role of Agent Amy Tanner and solve a case in a cyberpunk future, where technology and religion have become one - A classic pixel art point&click adventure.”
Chronique_des_Silencieux — “Set in 1970s southern France, you play a rookie private eye tasked to dig out the secrets of a stubborn old man. Think on your feet while you follow your leads : ask questions to witnesses, detect their lies, hypothesize why and finally confront the silent ones running from their past.”
Plans for February
Firstly, anyone who missed out on VN;Conf will be pleased to know that my talk will be uploaded online sometime soon, and I’ll be sharing the link with you when I can.
Preparing for my talk took a lot more time than I anticipated this week, and combined with a few other obligations, I didn’t have time to write up the longer post for today.
There was a lot — and I mean A LOT — of content that I wanted to have in my talk that I had to cut out due to time constraints:
The history and evolution of mystery stories
Statistical breakdown of mystery visual novels vs. other games
A deeper look at ontological mystery games and battles of wits
Rules for writing locked room mysteries and impossible crimes
Why mystery games are more relevant than ever in today’s society
My favorite cases and characters from the Big Four mystery games, and why
Each topic could very easily be its own blog post or video talk.
There was also a clear demand for a longer version of my talk — a “Kinjo cut” that combines everything together and gives me an extra 40 minutes to speak a little more slowly and go deeper into those extra topics.
I am currently thinking about how to organize all this information in the best way.
If you have any suggestions, or would especially like to see one of the above topics, please feel free to let me know.
But I can assure you that all of these topics will be covered at some point.
Now, I have three goals in mind for February:
Begin consistently posting on the Mystery Gamedev YouTube
Get the Mystery Game Database up and running
Publish at least one tool or resource for developers
March is known among visual novel developers for being NaNoReNo, the equivalent of NaNoWriMo for VNs: write a visual novel in just one month.
Many of our members are already thinking about making a mystery visual novel during March, so I’d like to publish at least one tool that will seriously help them out.
It will also be a great time to connect with other members of our community and build some more community projects together.
So, in short, all of February will be preparing for March.
I have so much planned, and I am so excited to finally make these ideas a reality.
Thank you all so much, and the best is yet to come!
Thanks for reading!
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