Paper Perjury

Great game! Its a fun take on a point and click and detective game bundled into one. Some of the puzzles can get a little tricky, but they are fun to figure out and solve. The pixel art is very well done and its really surprising the amount of content and animation in this one. Worth the price for sure!

couldnt get into the characters and mysteries like ace attorney and interrogations are boring with no penalty for getting something wrong

Justina Smith: Ace Clerk Investigations

A reviewer's duty is to simultaneously assist the artist (any media is art, so are games) on the one hand by pointing aspects of their work that could improve (those that can only be fully noticed when the product massively available) and any potentials consumers by informing them before they spend their money what they will get with the purchase . Yet, above all, in this digital era, I believe a review must be sincere, with warmth, and thus should not be afraid to express subjectivities. With that out of the way, I want to start by telling that I first noticed this game in 2024-September, via Youtube algorithm to the trailer. I honestly didn't think much of the product . The comments already pointed out the similarities with Ace Attorney (from now on AA), with the breakdowns and the main gameplay mechanic of reading to find contradictions. But the design style was definitely different, with a 2D that's typical from a western production in the late 2010s and while the trailer did show breakdowns, they were compared to AA much more contained. And the key difference was the background song used in the trailer: "Reveal the Truth". It striked an unheard balance from me, on the one hand it was supposed to be intense (more so if you intentionally remind the functions these melodies have in AA) but on the other hand, the 'piano' was the main instrument and it didn't outro itself with a bang, but in the trailer it led itself naturally to the title theme, which might be the most soothing song of the soundtrack. And yet, in spite of that (or maybe, because of it) it was an exciting and hopeful melody. You do have to admit that promoting yourself as a mystery story, which usually thrive on tension, with a lack of 'bang' is rather a daring proposal. I've kept it in the back of my mind and when I started hearing from some YouTube reviewers that this is 'Cozy AA', my reaction was 'yeah, that may sound about right'. Believing that this melody was proof that at least someone in the project cared, liking its sprite artwork and prioritizing indie's alternatives when choosing to play certain titles, I decided to wishlist it. Funny how in these next paragraphs I will try to use the most humanly possible of my reasoning/logical/verbal capabilities to describe what led me to this work in the first place, yet I already recognized that what led me to this game in the first place was something visceral. I was finally gifted a copy on discount it and decided to play it since I've thought I needed at that moment, if not a chill experience, at least a passive gaming experience that consisted of mostly reading, being asked by the gifter to give my opinion was also an incentive and might as well write it out ;x. So yeah, enough about me, [b] we can now fully talk about the game[/b]. Let's start by re-instating the obvious: if you've been searching for any kinda game and can't stand reading in most of your play experience and concentrating in order to do text interpretation, then I don't even know why you are here. Go find another more action-oriented game. It's fair to say that this is 'barely a game' and.... well yeah! Visual novels don't hide that and actually the main bulk of grading this product lies in the story. Yet, there are things that should be acknowledged of the gameplay. Firstly, I will keep taking as a standard of reference the Ace Attorney (AA) games. I don't believe this should be controversial. The game borrows all of its mechanics from this series. That's not itself wrong: one should ask how it distinguishes itself. Even taking exactly the same mechanics and making a worthwhile story justifies its existence. Luckily, the game does take advantage of coming after the 1st Ace Attorney to implement some [b] anti frustration features [/b], best explained in [url= https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VisualNovel/PaperPerjury]TV Tropes[/url] but I will repeat them here for sake of completeness. Not every mistaken choice will give you a standard 'wrong error' message. In some cases, the script of the game will try to tell you why that's not the best answer, will mention that you're on the right track and give you properties of the true answer. I've found this to be a fair way to reward players for being on the right track. However, I've hardly had the need for it. While I have not played the AAs -only watched playthroughs because I cared mainly for their story- I did find the answers in AA a permanent thinking outside the box. And in Paper Perjury, not only you had those tips but also ye'olde AA style general tip after you go through the whole testimony text. When you pair these tools with the fact that in my experience the answers were usually rather direct, the hardest possible evidence in the whole game might only demand you to read some explicit fine details in the 'evaluate'/'check’ options. That's it. It's true that I'm a 3X year-old with gaming experience and this ain’t my first USA-based police story (clichés and tropes are intuitively known to me), but, sincerely, I couldn’t have found it any harder than that: just comb through the evidence text and you should be fine. Another feature already pointed out by TV Tropes is the crossing of evidence. Evidence that you used that was a wrong answer will be crossed for the remainder of the text/testimony. I want to stress that this includes sentences where the player didn't use that evidence, not only the sentence it was used. The thing is, if you used a piece of evidence with a statement that was wrong and later you get to THE statement where you must use that evidence, it gets uncrossed. On the one hand, it would have been unfair to keep it crossed. On the other, this honestly feels like semi-cheating, because you're applying the evidence not by virtue of understanding the text and the crime described, but by being mischievous with the interface. I want to be awarded for understanding the story and the scenes described, not by these chance situations. These are reasons [b]I've found the game easy [/b] . You might argue that the game is easy in the way their most story-focused audience wants. Fair point, but potential buyer’s should know that this might not feel that rewarding to complete via its gameplay. Stressing this is the fact that unlike AA, there is [b]no[/b] equivalent to HP bar nor [b]game over[/b]. Still, I do believe that in principle these are good features and I do advise the publisher to showcase them better in their marketing of the game. They were unknown to me before playing the game. I don't believe they should be bragged (maybe other games in the genre apply them already and better, I dunno). But maybe show them in an image in the Store page? To show that they exist? I also want to point out to any potential buyer that here it persists widely known trait/defect/[b]issue in AA games[/b] where you get into a situation in which either you already know what happened or you’re pretty much in the correct trail and nothing can get you out of it; but the way the testimony is presented you have to understand what happened the way the game wants you to understand it and in the order the game expects you to understand it. So you might find a lie in the testimony, you present evidence that proves the lie, according to any common reasonable adult and the game will be like [b]'nope, you have before this to disprove something simpler'[/b]. Unfortunately, [b]this isn't solved in Paper Perjury[/b], I honestly even wonder if it's solvable. Since this genre is linear (and the problem comes from that linearity and the subjectivity involved of what is the most likely way the audience undercovers the truth). (Buckle up, this is a long one, I'm not even half way through this, hope the spoilers also work in comments)

It’s a good copycat of Phoenix Wright in many ways. If Phoenix Wright is S-tier, this is a solid A-, or B+. It carves out it’s own niche and I credit the writers and art team for doing a very good job making this a fun and interactive story wirh beautiful, colorful presentation.

Four cases in, I like it and it really scratches my itch for more Ace Attorney (which it references A LOT) though there is just a bit of tonal inconsistency (it goes from realistic to bonkers and back). The fact that it lacks the health bar from the Ace Attorney games just keeps you from save scumming, which is a HUGE positive. Sometimes I was a bit lost on what exactly were the inconsistencies, and I missed a bit more of investigation or the "pressure" mechanic to get more information, and well, it also falls into the visual novel trope of overexposition and underexposition at the same time, but sometimes it does really neat things like giving you gradual information about the main character instead of dumping everything at first. It also features really beautiful pixel art.