Detective Butler: Maiden Voyage Murder

Good day!
Detective Butler: Maiden Voyage Murder, this is the title of a visual novel adventure by Kinjo in 2013, and apparently the first adventure of a series af a series of games you can find HERE!

The story of the game starts in 1962 when a popular cruise ship went out of business after the death of two passengers, anyway the ship was kept as a tourist attraction until today, when it will set sail once again with a different name.

Now, one of our protagonists is Gilligan Golder, the son of Galvano Golder, a CEO of the G.G. Inc, a wealthy company. The two are on board with some employees of the company to celebrate a recent success, when suddenly an incident occurs during the cruise on the S. S. Lucille.
Luckily there is Detective Butler on board, an amateur reporter and detective that immediately start investigating, and Gilligan, that distrust his father after the mysterious death of his mother, decides to become the detective's assistant during this investigation.


Whoa whoa whoa... this is making me really hungry!!!

This game can be considered a visual novel, even if in its base version, the default free one, is more like a kinetic novel due to its extreme linearity and the only choice is the order in which the witnesses are interrogated. That's it! All good, but all linear. If you add the Choices DLC you can actually have some options to make the adventure more interesting with decisions throughout the game: some will just change some scenes and still make you go on the usual path, others will instead change the events and situations leading to new routes that were initially scapped from the original game. In short, the Choices DLC enhances the gameplay and the length of the game, otherwise expect a linear story. In any case the plot is not bad, and if you like mystery and detective stories you may enjoy it even if it's pretty short (3-4 hours, depend on how fast you read).

Now, the art: the game use a mix of two styles, characters made in anime style and photo-filtered backgrounds, it's an odd choice, but I personally liked the contrast and the choice. Music is ok, sometimes it was a bit repetitive but the tracks were overall nice, nothing more to say here.


The Choices DLC as you can see gives us more options and possibilities!

Final Verdict
Ok, this rating is for the game as it is, WITHOUTH the CHOICES DLC. Add another 0.5 to the rating for it (3.5/5 with Dlc if you cannot do maths!). The game is ok, it has menus, a journal/notebook about the hints and suspects, but no real gameplay so it's hard to recommend this visual novel to anyone who's not someone who is fond of detective stories and likes kinetic novels. This because there is practically no interactivity, and the story is totally linear. Overall an ok game, indicated for those who like this genre.