This game can be described in one word. Picturesque.

Picturesque graphics, story, atmosphere. And I don't mean that in a bad way, of course.

The art is amazing!! Very well done! Fits perfectly with the music and overall aesthetic.

However, I didn't enjoy the gameplay very much, simply due to a LOT of information provided all at the same time, I suddenly had about 55 papers on the murder scene, and I had NO idea where to even start!

You should stop the player from doing this (getting too much info and getting insanely confused, maybe make some of the dialogue options only available once you figure something out?), and you should add tooltips for the papers with explanations, so that you can review what the information actually means without having to exactly remember.

I like the different outcomes when you choose who to blame as the murderer! Very fun and interesting.

For a while I didn't realise I need to click on "Uncover the truth." in the start menu. The controls were a bit hard to get used to. I misslinked a lot of clues and for a long time I couldn't unlink them. It would also be great if you could exit from the dialog menus.

I really liked the character design and art. Cool ideas.

I think it's a great success for your first detective game!

SPOILER ALERT:

The story was cool. A lot of clues, even misleading. The player needs to not only think about the motives and opportunities, but also about alibis. I wasn't sure if I can trust the alibis, even tho other characters confirmed them. That made it harder for me - I was thinking about the characters being smarter than they seem to be and creating fake alibis. Eg.: Dalia and Rose going to the spa daily so one day Chulio with *magic hands* can make the job done. But there was no Chulio on the board and I figured it'd be a weird way to arrange the game.

I blamed the right guy guilty in the end, but I wasn't really sure about my choice. That's kinda ok I guess. I supposed you'd come up with something creative, so the detective was a perfect match. That also helped. The dialogue about the cult was a bit overwhelming for me - maybe if I paid more attention, I'd be more sure about it. What surprised me is that Srg. Young was the victim's son. Maybe I missed it somewhere in the dialogues?

(!!! VAGUE STORY SPOILERS, PLAY THE GAME FIRST !!!)

(FOR DEVS: After writing the whole review, I noticed it came across much more negative than what I wanted and  experienced . The overall experience was excellent for me - one of my favorites - maybe because it was so good I needed to tell you what I didn't like. So take this as: "Everything I didn't like and something I liked" because there is so much more to like than I wrote here. <3)

This game is very strong. The atmosphere is very well put together. The visuals look stunning and the music (albeit a bit repetitive after a while) works well with them. I very much appreciate that it was made by you as well. Extra impressive that all was made within the 48 hours.

The writing on this is excellent. The story is cohesive, all suspects are unique and pretty in-depth. They all have different personalities and motivations - that's cool!

The murder board mechanic is executed fairly well (some visual weirdness sometimes). And the merging of clues feels rewarding (although sometimes I felt like some just should give me something and didn't).

Now to the parts I didn't like very much.

First of all the dialogue system needs some improvements. When you talk to someone you cannot hear that conversation again, you just have to remember it, and when you accidentally skip one you lose it (you get some parts to your murder board). Also when you select someone you HAVE TO talk to them now, there is no "go back" button. When you have no option, the last conversation plays, which is annoying as you have to skip through (sometimes very long) dialogue.

The murder board is way too small (or there is way too many clues). Once I was done talking to all of them I had to start putting some on top of each other and even then I didn't have enough space to meaningfully assign clues to people and make connections.

Next, I don't know if it was my computer, but my game bugged !! 4 TIMES !! I was going through my clues, clicked on one (clue, not even suspect) and I had "GAME OVER - NOT THE KILLER" and I had to start again. This was very annoying, as this would happen even later so I had to skip all dialogue to get to the same place.

And lastly, maybe I missed something, but the reasoning behind choosing my suspect was based on method of elimination and in the final screen, I got a backstory that I didn't see hinted at anywhere. I don't know if this was intentional to "not be obvious" but it felt very unfulfilling. From the start you have an obvious suspect no. 1 (I immediately thought: "This is way too obvious, no way it's him") and then you have some clashing of motivations, but I chose the correct one only because I felt like this would "be a plot-twist", not because there were any huge indications one way or another. So if there is a way to get a lot more dialogues from merging clues I didn't find it and would say it is probably too hard to find (I spent about an hour on this game - 4 resets). At least for me it was. I got to the point that I just said "I really don't know what else, let's just choose a killer based on what I know".

When it comes to the ingredients, I see them clearly: "victim", "devil's advocate" and "reincarnation". So no problem there.

In the end, I really enjoyed the vibe of this. The writing was enticing - I REALLY wanted to get to the bottom of the murder (I suffered through 4 restarts). The graphics and music were great - and self-made(!!!!). The story board mechanic was fun, cool and functional. The end was pretty underwhelming or too hard to get to the stage where it would make sense (or I'm just bad - totally possible). I did encounter a nasty game-breaking bug, so that did take something away as well. But very good job to everyone! I loved it.