An impressive and faithful homage to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series! Excellent sound design and strong characterization carry this through!
Games like these live or die by their writing and thankfully the writing of the case itself is pretty stellar for a game jam (though I did notice one slip-up in referring to a "Tarquin Browning" instead of a "Tarquin Loughty"). There are a couple of stretches in conjecture that stuck out to me when presented with a protagonist with an analytical mind for decisive evidence, for example immediately exonerating Albion without hard evidence, but such niggles are forgivable given the onerous task of penning an entire whodunnit case on a time-limit. Impressive nonetheless!
Slightly less forgivable is both the lack of visual effects and interaction with the crime scene itself. We can look around the scene, but I was hoping to see a modicum of interaction such as commentary from Ida and Harriet on points of interest within the scene. Even when the dialogue referred to the discovery of new points of detail such as the key and the ash, I would have expected the camera to pan over to these points of interest and show a close-up view of the object in question. With the scene being so static, there is nothing to draw the player's eye other than the text and the few changing expressions of some of the (admittedly impressive looking) character sprites, reducing the effective field of play to only a small section of the screen. Hopefully one would expect more visual interactions and flair were this concept to be expanded upon outside of the game jam.
The last point to make is to the homage to the Phoenix Wright series, as I feel in some ways adherence to this established format does limits the game. Firstly, there is the pitfall of assumed knowledge - the game assumes that the player is familiar with knowledge of playing a Phoenix Wright game and understands the significance of 'pressing' testimony and 'presenting' evidence as contradictions to advance the story along. Secondly, the means of presenting the right evidence to advance the plot along feels like a character misstep for the analytical Harriet Fox compared to the luckier Phoenix Wright, who rightly gets called out in his games for his bluff tactics and clinging to wild conjecture. Resorting to desperate guesswork in the final act by resorting to randomly presenting X with Y statement felt at odds with how Harriet is presented to the player. If the premise was to be expanded upon, I would suggest a rethink as to how the investigation and the testimony elements could be implemented so as to be it's own format - one without the limitations of it predecessor and plays better in supporting the character's strengths.
On the whole I did enjoy my time with the game as an introductions for these characters. Hopefully we will see more from them in the future!
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! Tarquin Loughty was, in fact, Tarquin Browning up until the last few hours of development, when it was finally changed, because three of the characters had surnames starting with B - Beckwith (Culpepper), Browning (Loughty), and Berrycloth (Berrycloth).
You're also right in that the background is quite static; a victim of time constraints and my legendary inability to scope properly. At least the background itself is very nice to look at.
Your point about the dissonance between Fox's character and the gameplay style is a really good one, and definitely one I'll keep in mind should we make a follow-up. I'd love to say "sequel coming soon!", but I know better than to make promises.
Comments
An impressive and faithful homage to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series! Excellent sound design and strong characterization carry this through!
Games like these live or die by their writing and thankfully the writing of the case itself is pretty stellar for a game jam (though I did notice one slip-up in referring to a "Tarquin Browning" instead of a "Tarquin Loughty"). There are a couple of stretches in conjecture that stuck out to me when presented with a protagonist with an analytical mind for decisive evidence, for example immediately exonerating Albion without hard evidence, but such niggles are forgivable given the onerous task of penning an entire whodunnit case on a time-limit. Impressive nonetheless!
Slightly less forgivable is both the lack of visual effects and interaction with the crime scene itself. We can look around the scene, but I was hoping to see a modicum of interaction such as commentary from Ida and Harriet on points of interest within the scene. Even when the dialogue referred to the discovery of new points of detail such as the key and the ash, I would have expected the camera to pan over to these points of interest and show a close-up view of the object in question.
With the scene being so static, there is nothing to draw the player's eye other than the text and the few changing expressions of some of the (admittedly impressive looking) character sprites, reducing the effective field of play to only a small section of the screen.
Hopefully one would expect more visual interactions and flair were this concept to be expanded upon outside of the game jam.
The last point to make is to the homage to the Phoenix Wright series, as I feel in some ways adherence to this established format does limits the game. Firstly, there is the pitfall of assumed knowledge - the game assumes that the player is familiar with knowledge of playing a Phoenix Wright game and understands the significance of 'pressing' testimony and 'presenting' evidence as contradictions to advance the story along.
Secondly, the means of presenting the right evidence to advance the plot along feels like a character misstep for the analytical Harriet Fox compared to the luckier Phoenix Wright, who rightly gets called out in his games for his bluff tactics and clinging to wild conjecture. Resorting to desperate guesswork in the final act by resorting to randomly presenting X with Y statement felt at odds with how Harriet is presented to the player.
If the premise was to be expanded upon, I would suggest a rethink as to how the investigation and the testimony elements could be implemented so as to be it's own format - one without the limitations of it predecessor and plays better in supporting the character's strengths.
On the whole I did enjoy my time with the game as an introductions for these characters. Hopefully we will see more from them in the future!
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! Tarquin Loughty was, in fact, Tarquin Browning up until the last few hours of development, when it was finally changed, because three of the characters had surnames starting with B - Beckwith (Culpepper), Browning (Loughty), and Berrycloth (Berrycloth).
You're also right in that the background is quite static; a victim of time constraints and my legendary inability to scope properly. At least the background itself is very nice to look at.
Your point about the dissonance between Fox's character and the gameplay style is a really good one, and definitely one I'll keep in mind should we make a follow-up. I'd love to say "sequel coming soon!", but I know better than to make promises.
Thanks for playing!