Mystery Game Review: GENBA no Kizuna

No-spoilers review. Can you solve this Mesozoic Murder Mystery?

Happy Mystery Monday!

Today is the official release date of GENBA no Kizuna, a mystery game that has been in the making for a very long time now.

After playing through a pre-release version last month, it became clear that this game is an absolute masterclass in how to design and create a mystery visual novel.

It's very rare to find a mystery VN with such all-around quality and attention to detail, so that's really why I want to bring it to your attention today.

GENBA no Kizuna

A Mesozoic murder mystery, 4 suspects, 1 truth. Investigate, interrogate and present evidence as you set out to unravel the case with your team. Will you be able to accurately determine who took the victim's life? Or will your deductions lead you to arrest someone for a crime they did not commit...?

Disclaimer 1: Kinjo received a pre-release copy for beta testing purposes, and offered to write a full review after playing it. If you’re the developer of an upcoming mystery game you’d like to see reviewed in our newsletter, feel free to reach out.

Disclaimer 2: Kinjo has been friends with the creators of this game for ~10 years now, and hopefully that won’t influence the review too much. But Gospel is a huge reason why Mystery Gamedev even started in the first place, so feel free to tell him thank you!

The Review

GENBA no Kizuna is a murder mystery visual novel by Gosatsu Visual Novels, the creators of SHINRAI: Broken Beyond Despair. Technically, GENBA can be seen as a prequel to SHINRAI, but the games can be enjoyed in any order.

While SHINRAI was a Halloween-themed mystery, GENBA has a unique premise involving dinosaurs! Gosatsu are huge fans of Jurassic Park and dinosaurs in general, and that passion clearly shines through the whole game.

Dinosaurs are everywhere, from tiny figurines lining the shelves of a bedroom to a massive animatronic in the building's main hall. And an excessive amount of text is spent describing scientific and historical facts about dinosaurs that have absolutely nothing to do with the mystery.

(GENBA was also, from what I could find, the ONLY dinosaur-themed mystery game during Steam's Dinos vs. Robots Fest this year!)

But outside of dinosaurs, there's a second, more subtle, more meaningful theme. The game's title is in Japanese, and in English it translates to "bonds of the crime scene."

The game is focused on the fledgling bonds of police team as they investigate the crime scene. They're mostly inexperienced, and on their first case together they have to learn how to work effectively as a team in order to uncover the truth.

Story

You play as Officer Keiichi Genba, a relatively new recruit who's been assigned as the team lead to investigate a sudden and mysterious death: an unknown man was found "eaten alive by a dinosaur" in the former home of a world-renowned paleontologist.

Things get off to a rocky start when Officer Genba shows up late and makes a number of amateur mistakes, losing the respect of his fellow team members.

The prime suspects include four close friends who were at the residence filming a dinosaur-themed movie — plus their pet raptor.

None of them are cooperative with the investigation, none of them have an alibi, and none of them can even identify the man who died.

And so, it becomes clear that the investigation won't get far unless the team learns how to work together.

The story is over 300,000 words, including all optional text, and it took me about 15 hours to play from start to finish — so there’s plenty of content to enjoy.

To be fair, I do think some of those words could’ve been trimmed without losing too much, for the sake of faster pacing. But that’s really just my preference, and I know plenty of people enjoy stories that prefer to take their time building things up.

Regarding the characters, I was blown away by how they not only have distinct personalities, but unique ways of speaking, and even unique nicknames for each other.

Keeping track of all those things is not easy, both as a player but also as a writer. It really makes the whole world of GENBA seem real.

The mystery itself is very fair. My theories were always right in step with what the characters were about to deduce, so I always found it to be fair.

One of the best things about GENBA is its big focus on the little details, whether depicted in text, visuals, or sound. With such a strong emphasis on forensic investigation, accuracy is extremely important, and GENBA gets it right.

There are many, many things that are foreshadowed early on, or just plain in-your-face that don't become apparent until later on. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence and testimony to sift through, but it all makes perfect sense in the end.

I was genuinely convinced that each suspect could have been the killer at least once, and that's not an easy thing for a mystery game to pull off. The final chapter does something that I've never seen done before in any mystery story, and I love how its unique approach to the denouement ties itself into the rest of the game.

Gameplay

What sets GENBA apart from other mystery games is the way it handles its investigations.

Each member of the investigation team has their own gameplay style, and at various points you must switch between them. The police officers interrogate characters, the forensic investigator looks around for evidence, and the medical examiner checks out the dead body. These sections have their own gameplay mechanics, whether it’s selecting choices in the correct order, or clicking around the screen in search of clues.

Only after conducting these individual searches does the team come together to share what they've found. This format leads to situations where the characters individually don't have enough information to piece things together, but if the player is paying close enough attention, they can figure it out before the characters do.

Throughout the game, you will be presented with choices. None of these choices significantly branch the story, other than the final choice when asked to choose who you think is the killer, which can lead to a bad ending.

Instead, your choices mainly affect your detective rank, which is shown to you at the end of the game. I got a B on my playthrough, having reached a bad ending one time — not too bad!

Other choices provide opportunities to let you interact with the characters a bit more and strengthen the bonds of your team.

Evidence is collected and stored in the DPA (Digital Police Assistant), a tablet-like device which you can access from the menu.

It also contains various bits of trivia (especially about dinosaurs) as well as summaries of each chapter in the game, in case it's been a while since you last played and need to refresh your memory.

Art & Sound

GENBA's art consists of 2D sprites and digitally-drawn backgrounds, with a charming anime aesthetic. The art generally retains the same style as seen in SHINRAI, but with significant improvements from years of gained experience.

The number of CGs is around the same as in SHINRAI, but the quality has significantly improved when comparing them. Everything is at a much higher resolution and greater level of detail, which is exactly what you need for a game where the details matter most.

The soundtrack consists of 36 tracks composed by Solo Acapello (one of the award-winning composers of Reaplaced) and a special theme song with vocals from Lunacy.

I absolutely love this theme song in every way — not only is it a catchy tune I can't get out of my head, but the lyrics strongly resonate with the game's themes of friendship and teamwork.

All the other songs are high quality, too — and they feature a distinct set of instruments that really make you feel like you're wandering the Earth 65 million years ago.

I've found myself listening to many of these songs while working on other things, because you can easily put these on loop for a long time without getting tired of them.

Conclusion

And that's my overall impression of GENBA — a highly polished and high quality experience that you won’t find anywhere else.

If you're looking for a truly fun and unique mystery game from start to finish, you can purchase GENBA and its soundtrack on Steam today.

---

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 300+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

And please consider sharing our newsletter with a friend — we appreciate it!