I downloaded this game some months ago, offline, to my main desktop computer (which I usually use to play games), about time I made a proper comment. INCOMING REALLY LONG POST.
I very much enjoyed this game! I had no idea there were these kinds of Umineko forums where people focused on creating their own mysteries, then again I'm a huge hermit that prefers to lurk about so it's no surprise really. Still, shows how much influence Umineko still has when stuff like this is made : D
Yeah and you weren't kidding this game was difficult! Of course everyones mileage varies what constitutes a difficult mystery, but I think difficulty depends on what people don't notice, or what clues we dismiss as unimportant (yvxr V vavgvnyyl qvq va gur ybpxrq ebbz ybbc puncgre. V QVQ npghnyyl abgvpr gur ynpx bs qbbexabo fsk jura gur phycevg jnf ng gung bar qbbe, NAQ V QVQ abgvpr gurer jnf gur qbbe haybpxvat fsk gjvpr va n ebj evtug nsgre gung ohg V punyxrq vg hc nf lbhe zvabe reebe OHG AB. VG JNF ERYRINAG. V QVFZVFFRQ VG YVXR N SBBY. TBQ QNZZVG RIREL GVZR ZR. V QB GUVF JVGU NYZBFG RIREL ZLFGREL. JURA JVYY LBH YRNEA ZR). While I did end up using all the hints, I did appreciate the final answer wasn't just handed over and there was still stuff us the players could figure out, and your thoughts on writing mysteries that were there alongside the hints were very interesting to me. It really does boil down to trusting the author that all the clues and hints are present, which is what Umineko very much was all about really.
(V zrna qvq znantr gb svther Anawbf zheqre ba zl bja zbfgyl, vg whfg V qvqa'g guvax sne rabhtu fvapr jvgu gur 'bayl gur phycevg pna yvr jvgu checyr' ehyr, V jrag ba guvaxvat gur phycevg bayl yvrq nobhg gurve bja npgvbaf engure guna, jryy, GUNG. Ohg gung'f nabgure rknzcyr bs bhefryirf orvat gur ovttrfg bofgnpyr bs zlferl fbyivat V guvax nunununun. )
And the forum intermissions was a great story framing device and a great way to give a sort of a break in the story proper to step back and think about stuff, and also show what I assume what forum culture on Umineko style mysteries was like, and delivering a sort of a greek chorus while the protag (and us) were struggling for their metaphorical lives with all the other very troubling revelations. I guess there is something to be said about how a very, very meta story like Umineko can produce even further meta stuff about it. Meta within meta within meta. Matryoshka doll style meta?
And the ending was both terriffic and kinda haunting and don't know exactly 100% what all of it means, which is a compliment btw. One reason why I love Umineko is how mind screwy it could get. One of my favorite genres: 'I have no idea what's going on(complimentary)', which is the polar opposite of my most hated genre which is 'I have NO IDEA what the hell is going on here (derogatory)'.
tl;dr version: I really loved this, honestly it makes me want to come up with something similar. I always did want try my hand at making mystery stories, and this game experience certainly gave me ideas :)
I just finished this game. Oh. My. God. Brilliant!!! It took allll the hints for me, lol, to figure out who the culprit was, but BY GOD was it was still satisfying! Ngl, that's likely because I'm just really shit at figuring mysteries out in general, so any level of success counts as a victory for me lolol.
I... Acc haven't played any of the Umineko episodes. Nor had I even heard of them, until now. I don't even really play mystery games. But I had it downloaded one day while browsing through some visual novels on here because the description probably made it seem like an amateur passion project, and I love to read those.
But this didn't feel even REMOTELY amateur. It may be just because I'm unfamiliar with mysteries, but the puzzles felt genius and the way you utilised the forum posts was bone-chilling. Not to mention how the realisation at the very end about everyone else on the forum hit me.
Absolutely no regrets, despite how unnerved it had me feeling by the end. Freaking loved this. I hope you have a damn good day, whoever's reading this.
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
Your idea for how Battler could have been the culprit for the first murders is actually so damn smart, I never would have figured it out T_T How can there be a whole community of such incredible people on the internet? My faith in humanity has been restored by your post lol
(Not sure what the translation bit means, since I made the game -- but if you happen to be referring to the community's translations into Italian and Chinese then yes, I am indeed grateful for those!)
Hi! I just finished reading your forgery!! It was amazing and fun to solve! I unfortunately used all the hints and then some to solve it in the end but it was fun!
Well, this just happens sometimes. Enjoy the LUCKIEST playthrough of your game lmao
Spoiler wall aside.
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I did not even know if I had found a troll "you kinda failed" ending or the real ending when I submitted the solution. I was shocked that it worked. It was only after the culprit is talking about 'changed my name ...' that I realized it was correct.
I also did not really understand the structure of the Locked Room Loop until going over it a few times. Thought the servant/game room were connected directly to the dining room and was confused about Dining having two entrances. Didn't even know how many keys there were. Eventually figured it out though.
My 'issue' with the Locked Room Loop is that the game, in-universe, points out a wordplay about the word "locked", and that kinda just keeps nagging at me the whole time there. It's never really denied, it's just a dumb global wordplay thing that I had to try to ignore because it being the solution would be dumb, and yet the solution in my opinion is still kinda using it.
Basically, as the forum posts in-universe point out, "it was locked" could be an adjective or adverb. That's not directly what the solution does but it feels too close to it IMO: "it was locked" in Erika's statement refers to "it was locked at one point in time". It's not even like I didn't think of the mechanics of the lock trick being the solution either - I just didn't connect it.
I thought Erika was the culprit and Beatrice did not mention unlocking the door because it was never locked at all, followed by 'checking' the door being locked referring to some other time it was checked. After the failure I just switched the culprit to Beatrice lol.
The remote kill was not what I anticipated at all. It was curious the game kept referring to a trap in that section. I just thought the bullet was shot through the wall. And if there was a gun sitting on the floor that's such a hilarious risk, and wasn't it supposed to be in the opposite room, not so easily visible?
I always wanted to code something similar to a "ur the killer simulator" so that was excellent to see in the first section. Really enjoyed that! Honestly for the purple truth summary - I kinda wondered about being able to, after a culprit's been selected, show everyone else's text as red or something, because they must be true now. Purple truth is so much about organizing a certain set of statements as lies, but it's hard to keep that list at once, I think.
Finally there are, y'know, typos ;)
"outside of of" is in a branch in the Locked Room Loop submission somewhere
"seperately" (instead of 'separately') is in the hints, somewhere.
I found those two while playing normally, then looked through the script to see if there was any more:
THAT means he would've had to at least run to then run to place
at least run to then run to at least run to then run to place to place to place to place to place
Anyway, it's been great to read one of your works again!
Thanks for playing! Sorry for the delayed response. Your reaction of seeing how to submit the locked room solution was quite enjoyable.
This is kind of off-topic, the idea of a killer simulator is something that's been constantly on my mind; it's just that it's tricky to come up with a consistent implementation. Not in terms of the actual gameplay but a satisfactory game loop itself -- if you make a hypothetical game where you're the killer, to keep it fresh, you need to introduce a kind of randomization/roguelike component to it. And I've been racking my brain for years now trying to figure out how to do it in a way where the randomization components are not obvious after the first few attempts. Do too much randomization, though, and it becomes an implementation mess.
Still thinking of it. I'll get it someday, I'm sure. Eventually.
When it comes to the remote kill, the idea is that Nanjo had pulled on the string so hard when bursting through the door after being shot that it was pulled from the opposite room out in the hallway. It was a small-caliber gun, though, hence why it was less noticeable.
honestly I was kinda feeling like the delayed response might be because the way I solved it was so 'bad', lol. idk, it's probably not the path you were hoping players would go through
It sounds like the killer simulator idea is singleplayer, right? I've heard of Overboard (just lots of branching paths created) and Gnosia (randomization) which kinda do this, but probably aren't what you're going for.
I have had a similar thought about a future game I'd like to exist. It feels like 'social deduction' games with hidden roles don't quite simulate the experience of like, solving a murder mystery or gameboard, just because of the massive amount of hidden info and also there's like a "lack of possible tricks" imo. Like, you can definitely try to """deductively""" solve something in a social deduction game, or try to pull a trick and go 'undetected', but the lying/deception is the focal point there, which means even figuring out the killers involves the chance of not being believed. I also think this wouldn't work too well in singleplayer, as "AI figuring it out" would be luck based.
oh no no worries -- i can't say i'm prideful enough to consider any way of solving as bad -- as long as it's solved it's solved! that means you can't complain that it was too hard!!
overboard is fun but it's fundamentally a choose your own adventure -- the events that happen are all generally pre-determined so you're just tampering with existing routines. and Gnosia is mostly just mafia at the end of the day.
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……
The file is indeed 'script.rpy'. Everything is there. I'd note the "false_solutions" variable as it contains the "wrong answer" explanations during the mystery-solving minigame. There may be other points in the script where I've put some dialogue in the "code" sections but in general -- yeah, everything you need should be in there!
Hello Lambda's cotton candy. I hope your translation is going well.
I answer to you to say that a French translation is in progress and I want to know how you translate the game in Chinese (I already know to do it, I just want to know how you make it in your side)
My solution is to find the file named "script.rpy", and change its suffix to '.txt'. Then you may open it and search the dialogues mentioned in the game, and just replace the dialogues with words in your language. If there are garbled words when you start the game again, you just need to try another font which supports your language.
OK,it can work. Personnaly I created a new renpy project and I add all the game's files. After that, I generated translation files with renpy which find automatically the dialogue texts. After that, you just gave to translate sentence after sentence (unfortunately, it's a little more difficult than that because some sentences are not found by the generation method). And to edit the file I use Atom, which is include in renpy
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?
To answer your question, it is the former (but also, in addition to that, they poisoned the rest of their family). It's not outright stated, but implication was the chain of complicity, yeah.
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!
Well, it would be simply remiss of me if I didn't share the appreciation right back -- not only for seeing how much you enjoyed the work but that you took the time to write this feedback! Thanks so much for playing. It's things like this that really have an impact and make a person want to create more, so it's really appreciated.
I see your point on the second murder. Admittedly, my thought process for solving the mystery relied on the player recognizing the nature of the mechanism didn't really matter that much, but I can see how it might've been a leap in assumption. When it comes to this things, it's always difficult to gauge what a person's thought process may be, and my own has years of experience in the ways Umineko gameboards are constructed, so what I think a player might reach may not be the same for everyone.
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to write this!
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.
I'm glad to see you enjoyed it so much! I can only thank my beta-testers and some of the other players who helped me root out some of the tedium from the previous iterations of the game!
I'm curious, though -- what was was your solution for the third murder?
I thought that it was possible that the culprit screamed instead of the victim, and took advantage of the panic it caused to run over to them and kill them, under the guise of seeing what happened. Who got to the body first wasn't made clear, I think.
Interesting. I kinda thought the narrative itself got around that idea, but I can see how you could slip through the purples, at the very least, if you assume a certain person is the culprit. Might tighten up the purples a bit to disallow that option completely.
Looking at your reasoning, it's also good to see that the intended hint on the third murder worked!
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!
The "goddammit Battler" option was implemented two hours before release since my girlfriend suggested is as a theory that I hadn't considered. ^^"
The choice of visuals was ultimately arbitrary on my end. I wanted to visually communicate a different feel of the story from the get-go. My original plan was to have a UI similar to the MGS codec layout, with a rectangle containing the background being in the middle of the screen and character portraits being on the side, but I ultimately decided it against it since it didn't seem that aesthetically great. The final result kind of invokes those old adventure game/visual novel vibes which I think work well in the long run.
It was admittedly also an efficient way of cutting corners. The portrait and background art I had at my disposal wouldn't have managed to fill up the 1280x720 screen, and I wasn't in the mood to go digging and downloading massive files of several GB size. They perfectly fit the little window, though!
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.
Admittedly the code is a bit hacky on certain parts, and there's probably some qualify-of-life improvements to be had, but I'm glad it works, at least. I'm kind of thinking of iterating on it if I decide to do somethin like this again.
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I downloaded this game some months ago, offline, to my main desktop computer (which I usually use to play games), about time I made a proper comment. INCOMING REALLY LONG POST.
I very much enjoyed this game! I had no idea there were these kinds of Umineko forums where people focused on creating their own mysteries, then again I'm a huge hermit that prefers to lurk about so it's no surprise really. Still, shows how much influence Umineko still has when stuff like this is made : D
Yeah and you weren't kidding this game was difficult! Of course everyones mileage varies what constitutes a difficult mystery, but I think difficulty depends on what people don't notice, or what clues we dismiss as unimportant (yvxr V vavgvnyyl qvq va gur ybpxrq ebbz ybbc puncgre. V QVQ npghnyyl abgvpr gur ynpx bs qbbexabo fsk jura gur phycevg jnf ng gung bar qbbe, NAQ V QVQ abgvpr gurer jnf gur qbbe haybpxvat fsk gjvpr va n ebj evtug nsgre gung ohg V punyxrq vg hc nf lbhe zvabe reebe OHG AB. VG JNF ERYRINAG. V QVFZVFFRQ VG YVXR N SBBY. TBQ QNZZVG RIREL GVZR ZR. V QB GUVF JVGU NYZBFG RIREL ZLFGREL. JURA JVYY LBH YRNEA ZR). While I did end up using all the hints, I did appreciate the final answer wasn't just handed over and there was still stuff us the players could figure out, and your thoughts on writing mysteries that were there alongside the hints were very interesting to me. It really does boil down to trusting the author that all the clues and hints are present, which is what Umineko very much was all about really.
(V zrna qvq znantr gb svther Anawbf zheqre ba zl bja zbfgyl, vg whfg V qvqa'g guvax sne rabhtu fvapr jvgu gur 'bayl gur phycevg pna yvr jvgu checyr' ehyr, V jrag ba guvaxvat gur phycevg bayl yvrq nobhg gurve bja npgvbaf engure guna, jryy, GUNG. Ohg gung'f nabgure rknzcyr bs bhefryirf orvat gur ovttrfg bofgnpyr bs zlferl fbyivat V guvax nunununun. )
And the forum intermissions was a great story framing device and a great way to give a sort of a break in the story proper to step back and think about stuff, and also show what I assume what forum culture on Umineko style mysteries was like, and delivering a sort of a greek chorus while the protag (and us) were struggling for their metaphorical lives with all the other very troubling revelations. I guess there is something to be said about how a very, very meta story like Umineko can produce even further meta stuff about it. Meta within meta within meta. Matryoshka doll style meta?
And the ending was both terriffic and kinda haunting and don't know exactly 100% what all of it means, which is a compliment btw. One reason why I love Umineko is how mind screwy it could get. One of my favorite genres: 'I have no idea what's going on(complimentary)', which is the polar opposite of my most hated genre which is 'I have NO IDEA what the hell is going on here (derogatory)'.
tl;dr version: I really loved this, honestly it makes me want to come up with something similar. I always did want try my hand at making mystery stories, and this game experience certainly gave me ideas :)
I just finished this game. Oh. My. God. Brilliant!!! It took allll the hints for me, lol, to figure out who the culprit was, but BY GOD was it was still satisfying! Ngl, that's likely because I'm just really shit at figuring mysteries out in general, so any level of success counts as a victory for me lolol.
I... Acc haven't played any of the Umineko episodes. Nor had I even heard of them, until now. I don't even really play mystery games. But I had it downloaded one day while browsing through some visual novels on here because the description probably made it seem like an amateur passion project, and I love to read those.
But this didn't feel even REMOTELY amateur. It may be just because I'm unfamiliar with mysteries, but the puzzles felt genius and the way you utilised the forum posts was bone-chilling. Not to mention how the realisation at the very end about everyone else on the forum hit me.
Absolutely no regrets, despite how unnerved it had me feeling by the end. Freaking loved this. I hope you have a damn good day, whoever's reading this.
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
Your idea for how Battler could have been the culprit for the first murders is actually so damn smart, I never would have figured it out T_T How can there be a whole community of such incredible people on the internet? My faith in humanity has been restored by your post lol
That was a nice game, Thanks for the translation :)
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That sussy sneaky purple truth pull from Erika truly destroyed me
Thanks for playing!
(Not sure what the translation bit means, since I made the game -- but if you happen to be referring to the community's translations into Italian and Chinese then yes, I am indeed grateful for those!)
Hi! I just finished reading your forgery!! It was amazing and fun to solve! I unfortunately used all the hints and then some to solve it in the end but it was fun!
Well, this just happens sometimes. Enjoy the LUCKIEST playthrough of your game lmao
Spoiler wall aside.
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I did not even know if I had found a troll "you kinda failed" ending or the real ending when I submitted the solution. I was shocked that it worked. It was only after the culprit is talking about 'changed my name ...' that I realized it was correct.
I also did not really understand the structure of the Locked Room Loop until going over it a few times. Thought the servant/game room were connected directly to the dining room and was confused about Dining having two entrances. Didn't even know how many keys there were. Eventually figured it out though.
My 'issue' with the Locked Room Loop is that the game, in-universe, points out a wordplay about the word "locked", and that kinda just keeps nagging at me the whole time there. It's never really denied, it's just a dumb global wordplay thing that I had to try to ignore because it being the solution would be dumb, and yet the solution in my opinion is still kinda using it.
Basically, as the forum posts in-universe point out, "it was locked" could be an adjective or adverb. That's not directly what the solution does but it feels too close to it IMO: "it was locked" in Erika's statement refers to "it was locked at one point in time". It's not even like I didn't think of the mechanics of the lock trick being the solution either - I just didn't connect it.
I thought Erika was the culprit and Beatrice did not mention unlocking the door because it was never locked at all, followed by 'checking' the door being locked referring to some other time it was checked. After the failure I just switched the culprit to Beatrice lol.
The remote kill was not what I anticipated at all. It was curious the game kept referring to a trap in that section. I just thought the bullet was shot through the wall. And if there was a gun sitting on the floor that's such a hilarious risk, and wasn't it supposed to be in the opposite room, not so easily visible?
I always wanted to code something similar to a "ur the killer simulator" so that was excellent to see in the first section. Really enjoyed that! Honestly for the purple truth summary - I kinda wondered about being able to, after a culprit's been selected, show everyone else's text as red or something, because they must be true now. Purple truth is so much about organizing a certain set of statements as lies, but it's hard to keep that list at once, I think.
Finally there are, y'know, typos ;)
I found those two while playing normally, then looked through the script to see if there was any more:
at least run to then run to at least run to then run to place to place to place to place to place
Anyway, it's been great to read one of your works again!
Thanks for playing! Sorry for the delayed response. Your reaction of seeing how to submit the locked room solution was quite enjoyable.
This is kind of off-topic, the idea of a killer simulator is something that's been constantly on my mind; it's just that it's tricky to come up with a consistent implementation. Not in terms of the actual gameplay but a satisfactory game loop itself -- if you make a hypothetical game where you're the killer, to keep it fresh, you need to introduce a kind of randomization/roguelike component to it. And I've been racking my brain for years now trying to figure out how to do it in a way where the randomization components are not obvious after the first few attempts. Do too much randomization, though, and it becomes an implementation mess.
Still thinking of it. I'll get it someday, I'm sure. Eventually.
When it comes to the remote kill, the idea is that Nanjo had pulled on the string so hard when bursting through the door after being shot that it was pulled from the opposite room out in the hallway. It was a small-caliber gun, though, hence why it was less noticeable.
Anyhow, thanks for playing again!
honestly I was kinda feeling like the delayed response might be because the way I solved it was so 'bad', lol. idk, it's probably not the path you were hoping players would go through
It sounds like the killer simulator idea is singleplayer, right? I've heard of Overboard (just lots of branching paths created) and Gnosia (randomization) which kinda do this, but probably aren't what you're going for.
I have had a similar thought about a future game I'd like to exist. It feels like 'social deduction' games with hidden roles don't quite simulate the experience of like, solving a murder mystery or gameboard, just because of the massive amount of hidden info and also there's like a "lack of possible tricks" imo. Like, you can definitely try to """deductively""" solve something in a social deduction game, or try to pull a trick and go 'undetected', but the lying/deception is the focal point there, which means even figuring out the killers involves the chance of not being believed. I also think this wouldn't work too well in singleplayer, as "AI figuring it out" would be luck based.
Thanks for responding :)
oh no no worries -- i can't say i'm prideful enough to consider any way of solving as bad -- as long as it's solved it's solved! that means you can't complain that it was too hard!!
overboard is fun but it's fundamentally a choose your own adventure -- the events that happen are all generally pre-determined so you're just tampering with existing routines. and Gnosia is mostly just mafia at the end of the day.
Thanks for playing!
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……
Hello! Thanks for playing!
Feel free to translate! I'd be honored!
The file is indeed 'script.rpy'. Everything is there. I'd note the "false_solutions" variable as it contains the "wrong answer" explanations during the mystery-solving minigame. There may be other points in the script where I've put some dialogue in the "code" sections but in general -- yeah, everything you need should be in there!
Thanks! The problem is solved!
Hello Lambda's cotton candy. I hope your translation is going well.
I answer to you to say that a French translation is in progress and I want to know how you translate the game in Chinese (I already know to do it, I just want to know how you make it in your side)
My solution is to find the file named "script.rpy", and change its suffix to '.txt'. Then you may open it and search the dialogues mentioned in the game, and just replace the dialogues with words in your language. If there are garbled words when you start the game again, you just need to try another font which supports your language.
OK,it can work. Personnaly I created a new renpy project and I add all the game's files. After that, I generated translation files with renpy which find automatically the dialogue texts. After that, you just gave to translate sentence after sentence (unfortunately, it's a little more difficult than that because some sentences are not found by the generation method). And to edit the file I use Atom, which is include in renpy
hello, I have published a Chinese version in BiliBili and tieba, maybe it can help your translating work.
Damn, I loved this. Excellent job. Umineko is one of my favorite stories and this is such an amazing tribute to it.
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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?
Thanks for playing!
To answer your question, it is the former (but also, in addition to that, they poisoned the rest of their family). It's not outright stated, but implication was the chain of complicity, yeah.
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!
Well, it would be simply remiss of me if I didn't share the appreciation right back -- not only for seeing how much you enjoyed the work but that you took the time to write this feedback! Thanks so much for playing. It's things like this that really have an impact and make a person want to create more, so it's really appreciated.
I see your point on the second murder. Admittedly, my thought process for solving the mystery relied on the player recognizing the nature of the mechanism didn't really matter that much, but I can see how it might've been a leap in assumption. When it comes to this things, it's always difficult to gauge what a person's thought process may be, and my own has years of experience in the ways Umineko gameboards are constructed, so what I think a player might reach may not be the same for everyone.
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to write this!
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.
I'm glad to see you enjoyed it so much! I can only thank my beta-testers and some of the other players who helped me root out some of the tedium from the previous iterations of the game!
I'm curious, though -- what was was your solution for the third murder?
I thought that it was possible that the culprit screamed instead of the victim, and took advantage of the panic it caused to run over to them and kill them, under the guise of seeing what happened. Who got to the body first wasn't made clear, I think.
I wrote down the train of thought that led to me solving the murders here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15MobEUaJRZuDApsJfi936hlrjNZdPIxFLAlCjtVFDa8/...
Interesting. I kinda thought the narrative itself got around that idea, but I can see how you could slip through the purples, at the very least, if you assume a certain person is the culprit. Might tighten up the purples a bit to disallow that option completely.
Looking at your reasoning, it's also good to see that the intended hint on the third murder worked!
This visual novel is really cool so far. I'm going to keep playing it, but I love the aesthetics and plot development so far.
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!
Thanks for playing, glad to see you liked it!
The "goddammit Battler" option was implemented two hours before release since my girlfriend suggested is as a theory that I hadn't considered. ^^"
The choice of visuals was ultimately arbitrary on my end. I wanted to visually communicate a different feel of the story from the get-go. My original plan was to have a UI similar to the MGS codec layout, with a rectangle containing the background being in the middle of the screen and character portraits being on the side, but I ultimately decided it against it since it didn't seem that aesthetically great. The final result kind of invokes those old adventure game/visual novel vibes which I think work well in the long run.
It was admittedly also an efficient way of cutting corners. The portrait and background art I had at my disposal wouldn't have managed to fill up the 1280x720 screen, and I wasn't in the mood to go digging and downloading massive files of several GB size. They perfectly fit the little window, though!
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.
Great to hear, thanks for playing!
Admittedly the code is a bit hacky on certain parts, and there's probably some qualify-of-life improvements to be had, but I'm glad it works, at least. I'm kind of thinking of iterating on it if I decide to do somethin like this again.
Interesting <3 I enjoyed it ٩(º﹃º٩)