Forget the Golden Witch

This was soooo fantastic! I've just recently got into/finished watching a playthrough of Umineko, so this was fun and felt like an authentic bonus minisode. Getting to play the purple truth minigame for myself was a blast, and I loved the crime reconstruction aspect of the locked room circle. I did end up tunneling on (SPOILERS)

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Battler, as I figured the trick for the boat killing was something as hackneyed as "everyone else behind Shannon and ahead of Battler was asleep as he stood up and made his way to her" LOL. (BTW, the "type-your-own solution" section for this made me grin ear-to-ear as the solution dawned on me once I actually looked at the diagram and remembered we were working with a 3D space) I ended up very attached to him being the culprit, and came up with a solution I think works for how he could've done the locked room, if he had been the murderer? 

He locks the main hall-dining room door, tosses its key into game room, locks game room, tosses game room key into dining room,  locks kitchen-dining room door, opens window in servant room, puts the kitchen-dining room key in there, locks the servant room door and simply palms the servant room key for now. 

All doors are locked, but the trick was when the survivors gather in the main hall in the morning and Battler relents on breaking down the door, opting instead to check, rather than going to peer through the dining room window, what he REALLY did was enter the servant room through the open window, grab the kitchen-dining room key, lock the window, unlocks the servant room door, goes to unlock the kitchen-dining room door, deposits the servant key, relocks the kitchen-dining room door from the outside, heads back to the servant room, deposits the kitchen-dining room key there, then rejoins the group to bust down the main hall-dining room door.

At that point, he makes sure to grab the servant and game room keys, and I read his hesitation in opening the servant room door as him feigning apprehension while he covertly locked the door with the key before passing it to Erika, who confirmed it was locked, because it really was. So the trick was that it was locked when Shannon checked it in the morning, as well as when Erika checked it after breaching the dining hall, it just wasn't locked between the two points. I was right about a door unlocking being pantomimed, just whiffed on which one/who did the gimmick, lol.

The Nanjo-Erika conversation about being discreet in what you share was excellent foreshadowing for who attacks Shannon on the boat and why, btw! Should've immediately tipped me off about who the culprit was.

I loved reading through the hints, more so because it felt like talking with a friend about Umineko and impossible crime novels in general!

Again, really great job, and thank you for the fantastic and free game: I'm currently working on my own murder-mystery visual novel about impossible crimes with some Umineko flair, and I'm so happy to stumble across your work! (Someone had suggested Eulogy for Reason as I was looking for taped-room mysteries, and I was ecstatic to see Umineko fangames also listed here!) Can't wait to work through the rest of your stuff

That was a nice game, Thanks for the translation :)

Spoiler

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That sussy sneaky purple truth pull  from Erika truly destroyed me

Could I try translating this into Chinese so that fans of Umineko in China can also  play it?  Well...But I don't know which file is used to store dialogues. Is it the file named "script.rpy"？ But it doesn't seems to contain all the dialogues……

Damn, I loved this. Excellent job. Umineko is one of my favorite stories and this is such an amazing tribute to it. 

SPOILERS 

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I love the idea of using an Umineko gameboard and forum as means to reveal another murderer. I've lurked in a few Umineko forums and this idea just is interesting. How curious that the true culprit must have been obsessed with Umineko and fans' gameboards. Maybe they told Tohya the truth because secretly they wanted to be found out all along and saw in them a real detective who would really understand them? Was their Umineko obsession an unconscious cry for help for someone to reveal their own crimes? Hm.

Lastly, it's late here and perhaps I misread but did the culprit outright kill both their mother and grandmother, or was it mother and grandfather? I think I read it was the former but then why did they kill the grandmother? Did I miss something and she was also complicit in covering up everything? 

What an absolute treat of a story— this both excels as a forgery and a complex story "outside" the gameboard, creating some very impressive interplay between both sides of the narrative. I was very positively surprised by the change in tone once you arrive at the first interlude and realize this story isn't just a spruced up EP8-esque purple board, but something more ambitious than this. I love the setting of the forgery forum and the way the protagonist talks about it and its users; while I joined the Umineko fandom at a point in time where these kinds of forum cultures had already more or less started dying, I remember the time I spent lurking there very fondly. (I enjoyed the hints section for that reason quite a bit as well; they were thoughts on mystery/gameboard writing and how they stood in relation to Umineko, after all.) 

Big kudos to you for the visual presentation; the use of the box/line to denote story "modes" such as a body discovery, regular gameboard segments or forum discussions are delightful and I must admit that I caught myself gasping in surprise when I first saw the previously black background change to a blood splatter and watched the purple frame turn to the red we're all so familiar with. 

I also cannot neglect to mention the amazing answer minigame— as someone who has worked with Ren'py quite a bit before, I was very impressed by your system and all its quirks, and I do admit that I ended up going through the code just to see what else I could find in there. (It did not disappoint. The poisoned sugar entry was hilarious.) 

In regards to the mystery itself, of course, I was very impressed with how it was designed; really throwing everything at you without mercy, making you doubt yourself and your refusal to believe that these incidents just being entirely impossible— a seemingly ruthless attack you can't reason your way out of.  
I don't know to what degree you planned this, but to me, a lot of the gameboard's workings felt like a cleverly devised trap to trick you into gaining tunnel vision and only focusing on the wrong parts, especially for people who've consumed Umineko fanworks before, who are already familiar with the tropes and tricks of the genre and naturally hold certain expectations when reading a story like this. From the cast (and survivor) choices, the character writing, the chaotic pacing and hectic back and forths between the survivors during key moments, to the clarification of the rules to lull you into a false sense of security regarding certain culprit possibilities, the twist of the second narrative that's correlated with the one on the board... every moment felt like it was designed to throw you off and cause you to start second-guessing literally anything because you could no longer be certain if it really did happen the way you assumed it to be. I had to sleep on the mystery to really gain the clarity to get the correct approach, which I happened to find through the final incident; though the other murders still gave me a lot more trouble and kept me doubting my approach again and again until I finally got it right. 

Admittedly, I felt that the second incident wasn't exactly the "weak link" of the mystery that the hints implied it was; if you solve it, the rest of the mystery would most likely be very easy, but I found it to be a much more difficult starting point than the third incident. I personally think that the "lucky" factor relating to the door wasn't exactly properly hinted at, which led to me just randomly picking all the door options during the minigame because to me, it seemed there wasn't really enough information for me to go off of, as well as the possibility it wasn't even locked during the incident to begin with. This is, of course, just my opinion, and I could've overlooked something in the narration or purples pointing towards that, but I wanted to share this with you all the same.

Overall, I have to say that I absolutely love this game. It's well-written, has a challenging mystery, a stunning sense of style and visuals, and a top-notch way to put your skills to the test. Thank you for sharing your wonderful work, and I hope this comment was, despite its wordiness, able to communicate my appreciation. Have a nice day or evening! 

It was a really fun game. Took me reading through all of the hints except the last one, but I got the answer eventually. Like the hints said, I managed to find the culprit once I realized who had to have lied for the second closed room to be constructed, and then I managed to get through the first closed rooms as well by checking the culprit’s statements for a weak point. The third murder was a little harder, since the solution I had in mind didn’t quite fit the options provided, but I eventually managed to guess it. Funnily enough, the clue pointing towards the solution didn’t even cross my mind. The system for solving the mysteries was really fun, especially the one for the first murder, and the sense of accomplishment I felt once I submitted an answer and no text popped out telling me that I was wrong was probably the greatest one I’ve felt in a while.

That was really neat! I think you painted an interesting example of a totally alternate world that still had some cool connections to the original, and the purple statements were quite well synthesized. My friend was able to figure it out on their second try with the help of the system. Sadly, I didn't quite get it and had to end up cheating by reading through the script file eventually, I enjoyed looking through the data though and the eventual solution was fairly ingenious (and very traditional). The minigame was particularly amusing, even if it ended up being what I had to just use a hint for.

I had an alternate theory for the second scenario that I thought made sense, and then ended up with a set up for the third scenario based on the purples, but overall there was just no way to get it to work with the first case without some serious contrivance or wordplay. I'm a bit sad I wasn't able to solve it myself, but I did fill up a good ten or twenty pages with notes and spend a few hours staring at it, so I definitely gave it the good college try. It's the sort of one where even though I'm sad I like how the actual result ends up and I at least guessed at a few parts of it myself. Good job, excellent game board. I might drop my theories on your twitter release post.

I also found it really funny to run into the "goddammit battler" option in the code while I was trawling through it, it was actually really close to a theory I myself had at some point but ran into flaws while trying to execute because I hadn't thought about the potential for jams. Of course, any such theory would probably fall apart in the second case I think, but it was worth a try.

I thought the frame plot was maybe a bit melodramatic, but at the same time, it was quite novel and interesting.  And I mean, this is Umineko we're talking about, we all read Ep 4, melodrama is the name of the game amirite? The stuff in the hints was really cool and a fun little conversation with the author, and the final ending was pretty intriguing. Do not, my friends, become addicted to sugar.

I noticed a few examples of what I'm pretty sure are typos, if you'd like I could send you their specific locations so you can fix them up at your leisure. I'm sure that being a 1.0 version they're quick and dirty stuff you'll get rid of yourself soon enough, but I thought I'd offer nonetheless.

The visual effects were quite good, and I enjoyed a lot of the Ren'py work done to make it function. I've been working on my own Umineko fanwork in Ren'py lately (just a fantasy one because I've always been kinda middling at mysteries, mind you), and it was really cool seeing everything you did. The tiny frame was a really interesting visual choice, I'm a bit curious about why you went with it. It looks great with the bigger effects! As a fellow Umi fan writer, I'm happy to see Yomotsu Hirasaka and Prison STRIP getting more appearances, I hope to use them myself as well.

Overall, quite an awesome little story, it must have taken a lot of effort. Thanks for sharing it!

I really enjoyed this forgery! Funny enough, it took me 1 hour to solve the first mystery without hints and less than five minutes to solve the next two. But I really enjoyed the way you coded the solving part, with as much interactivity as it had. Really takes full advantage of the vn medium.