A chain of murders cuts through a city’s entertainment elite between December 1978 and April 1979, and a detective named David Mart works the cases one staged car crash, one poisoned actor, one stage-sword killing, one hotel bombing, one radio-station electrocution and one disco double killing at a time. The 1978 aesthetic carries the presentation: a sparse cool soundtrack, noir framing, and period details that ground each scene without museum-piece fussiness. Structurally the game transplants the notebook-deduction format into a crime-thriller serial, and the transplant suits both halves: each murder is solvable locally while the web behind them grows case by case.
The deduction loop is the heart. Clues are clicked from scenes and characters, statements assemble in a notebook, and each case closes with a who-why-how reconstruction that rewards reading carefully before committing. Free-roam interludes between cases let the journalist detective chase leads in the city at large, and hunting the one missed clue on a nearly complete board delivers its own small satisfaction. Piecing the whole picture together is the experience’s purest pleasure, and the loop never wears out across eight cases.
The conspiracy beneath binds everything. Recurring K-stamped notes, a drug called gaze, and the Ad Astra self-help centres knit smugglers, a cult-like empire, corrupt police and complicit media into one continuous saga, with a war-hero kingpin at its centre and the detective himself a named participant in the mystery. Every case peels another layer, backstabs compound on backstabs, and the interlocking structure gives the finale a payoff that justifies the whole serial, with a cult-centre massacre and a mansion’s mass poisoning closing the count.
Name recall is the loop’s most persistent friction. Character names do not carry between cases, so familiar faces from earlier chapters must be re-identified from scratch each time, fumbling mid-case recognition that the notebook format should have solved. Combined with easy-to-skim clue text that hides items from a quick read, the game punishes attention lapses more than reasoning failures, and the missed-clue hunts that follow are more tedious than instructive.
Some deductions devolve into guesswork. When the correct phrasing for a reconstruction is not obvious, brute-force trial and error becomes the pragmatic strategy, and the wording of certain answers, the mansion’s mass-poisoning entry chief among them, resists comprehension no matter how many times it is read. In a genre built on earned inference, those walls stand out as design lapses rather than difficulty, and the sentence-structure ambiguity of the deduction editor compounds them.
The English translation is rough in places. Misspellings and awkward constructions occasionally slow comprehension of otherwise dense clue text, an odd blemish in a genre where reading is the primary verb. The full run also lands well under the advertised length for anyone moving briskly, though the tightness suits the serial format.
Overall, the collect-and-deduce loop, the interlocking conspiracy and the period atmosphere make this a tightly designed, genuinely satisfying entry in the notebook-deduction line, and the finale earns its climax across the whole eight-case web. Names that reset between cases, a few brute-force wording walls and rough localisation are real blemishes on a game whose core is this rewarding.
