A Romantic Murder (Demo)

A free otome visual novel/Ace Attorney-style investigation game set in the 1930s, currently with a demo available and the full game expected to be released in Q4 of 2023. You play as Mae (or the name of your choice), a detective pried out of London to investigate the suspicious death of one Henry Graves.

But when you arrive at the dead man's country manor, things aren't quite as you expected. Your clients don't take you seriously, the staff is behaving suspiciously, and the will reading is one step from becoming a brawl.

On the bright side, there's no shortage of handsome men about the place.

Less cheerfully, some of them may shortly become murderers. Or corpses.

 - Main Characters -

- Story and Gameplay -

After the short common route, the game diverges into one of four routes. Each one is associated with a love interest, and each has unique murder(s) and unique murderer(s). It's up to you to solve those murders, using point and click investigation to collect evidence that you can shove in the faces of the necessary people in order to progress and survive. 

In the meantime, you'll be getting closer to one of the four eligible men around the place, since as the old saying goes: nothing brings two people closer than trying to figure out how to survive a killer in a creepy English manor while trapped by a snowstorm and malicious sabotage. That's a saying, right?

If you live through all that, there's still the original murder that brought you there - who, if anyone, killed Henry Graves? 

- The Demo-

The demo of this game was made for Otome Jam/Josei Jame 2023 and makes up about 15-20% of the full game. The demo includes: 

• About 30k words, or around 3 hours of playtime
• The full common route
• 20% of Blake's route, up to the first murder
• 20% of James' route, past the first murder and through the first investigation
• 14 unique backgrounds
• 12 characters
• 6 CGs
• 2 murders
• And 1 detective at the end of her tether

The full game will be out for free at some point probably later this year, after I've slept for a week and stopped hating these people and their ridiculously hard to draw outfits.

Follow me on Twitter for updates and possible bonus pictures of the boys with animal ears, because it's going to happen one of these days.

- Rating -

Well, this is a murder mystery. Nobody is safe. Love interests will die... and kill. You may also die. Actually, you're probably the one who's going to die the most, given your investigative nature and the general risk to a murderer from having a detective around.

Still, we're more BBC than Saw over here, so nothing that Agatha Christie would have fainted over. Let's put it at T for teens. 

- Features -  

Point and click investigation

Each body comes with one or more investigation screens, though they're not shown here to prevent spoilers. Look around to find the evidence you need, which will then be stored in your evidence collection menu. Revisit it whenever you want, and submit it when you need to prove someone's guilt... or innocence. 

The family tree

Track the characters and their relationship to each other on the family tree. In the demo, that's all this does. In the full game, this will also be where you can track what you've found out about people across the various routes, including what they've told you each time. Which brings us to-  

A consistent world

Okay, we've all played games where people change from route to route, right? They do horrible things in one route and then poof, nothing happens the next time around. That's not the case here. If someone tells you one thing in one route and then another in the next, they are lying to you. If someone murders someone in one route, they'd do it again - there's just a reason why they can't or won't. And it's almost always because of something you did.

All this to say, there are eight murders over the course of the full game and only eleven characters besides you. Watch your back. 

Flavor choices

This is a house full of irritating people, and you need to be able to express that in your own way. It's up to you if you want to be icily polite or go around punching people, have a police background or a somewhat disreputable past. Just try not to kill anyone. There's enough of that going on already. 

You can put your hat on

Quite literally, this is what that means. You have a hat and a monocle and you can whip them on and off as suits you. Why? Well, why wouldn't you? 

Credits and Thanks

Because I'm not bright, I chose to do the writing, programming, and art assets for the jam by myself.

However, in a brilliant surprise, this entire process was hugely assisted by the all-around fantastic Shar. They threw themselves voluntarily into the fray and not only improved every part of the flow and structure of the overall writing, but also ensured that any actual British person playing this hopefully won't be driven to murder the Canadian who wrote it.

They also provided testing, gave incredibly useful feedback, and may or may not have yandere-ified at least one character.

I have also been blessed with additional help from a lady yet unnamed, who tested the routes and programming to the limits of their endurance. Amazingly, she did this even though I originally did not make it clear to her that this was supposed to be a romance game and she was therefore quite confused by all the fit guys popping up in the middle of the murders.

Finally, I originally planned, in a fit of madness, to try to do the music myself during the game jam. That was a mistake, and all my thanks go out to Kevin MacLeod and Rafael Krux for providing their excellent music to the world for free. Specific credits for each song and sound effect used are included in a text file with the download of the demo.