Cuties & Clues

Premise:

The premise of Cuties and Clue is simple: six up-and-coming youtubers woutubers were invited to the mansion of a prominent woutuber Pomelon. But shortly after they get there, Pomelon is found dead and the murderer could be anyone in the mansion. And while waiting for the authorities to show up, the six woutubers decide to investigate on their own to discover who the murderer is.

You select one of these six woutubers (each one has a different color coding, 2-3 skills and different stat spread) and set out to discover clues that would prove the innocence/guilt of 7 possible suspects (the other 5 woutubers plus Pomelon's maid and butler).

Now, the investigation part is very simple. You just walk from room to room, opening chests and every once in a while, one of them would contain footage that would prove the innocence of a particular character. There are several complications to this formula. First, the mansion is filled with monsters and traps (for whatever reason), second, certain doors are locked and require you to search chests for a key to to open them. Third, time passes while you are searching the mansion and after a certain time, the murderer will start to hunt your character.

To explain these parts in more detail, the game is pretty much a regular RPG with a twist. Touching wandering monsters on the screen brings up a turn based battle, with your character being able to defend themselves with their default skills plus equipable skills provided by items in their inventory. Each enemy, skill and item/attack also has a different color and there's a whole "color weakness" system, where certain colors are strong against particular colors etc. You don't really need to worry about that too much. Also, when you attack an enemy, they flash momentarily and hitting the confirm key when they flash increases the damage they take. Overall, the system works well. You find new items providing different skills in chests all the time and you have a limited carrying capacity, so you do need to pick and choose.

The traps are in front of electrical wires on the ground, pitfalls, spikes, darts shooting out of the walls etc., which you all need to avoid, else you take damage. There's also HP restoring items all around the mansion in the form of various types of food, which ensure that you are rarely in danger of running out of HP.

As for the murderer, once enough time passes and your character is in the hallway, the screen grows dark red and a figure in a bunny mask starts chasing your character. If your character runs from them to a different location, they are safe, but a random suspect dies. If the murderer catches them (or more likely, you run straight at them), you enter into a turn based battle with the murderer. If they manage to defeat you, it's game over, but if you last a few turns against them, they run away and no suspect dies. Therefore, standing your ground against the bunny-mask killer is essential if you want to get the best ending.

Once you prove the innocence of enough suspects, the next chest seems to contain footage proving who the real culprit is and then, you need to defeat the bunny-mask killer and unmask them to prove who they are and win the game!

Presentation:

Cuties and Clues is very gorgeous, with cute characters and interesting enemies (although there seems to be only a handful of different types) and a very charming artstyle. The custom menus in particular add much to the game, the character selection screen would be a pinnacle of this if it functioned properly. Definitely one of the game's strengths!

Negatives:

The first thing that leaves a negative impression is the Character Selection screen. Now, there's nothing wrong with the graphical side of things, it looks great, just... the performance is horrible. Just pressing a key to browse between possible characters lagged a lot and could even seemingly freeze the game for a time. Thankfully, the rest of the game works perfectly well.

Now, the main flaw of the game... it is very, very easy and it's honestly trivial to save everyone once you know how it works. The only time you are in any danger is at the very start, but that changes very quickly. You level up pretty fast from enemy encounters and chests frequently contain permanent stat boosts, meaning you quickly turn into an unbeatable demigod that can one-shot most enemies. The only enemies that threaten you past the very early game are the first and second times you encounter one of those monsters in a chest. The murderer fights also seemed a bit too underwhelming except maybe the first time, using a wrench or Bodibuldoses's attack with a chance to stun worked really well (maybe I was really lucky with the RNG?).

The part where it's most obvious is when it comes to the traps. They do about 1 or 2 damage in a game where you start with around 30 HP and get more very quickly. Each room with traps also has HP restoring food items lying around that are quick to negate any damage you might have suffered. Therefore, in their current form, the traps seem too weak and with barely any impact on the game.

There are also some other minor issues. For example, locked doors are distinguished from the unlocked ones by their color. However, when you interact with them without a key, there's no textbox or sound effect to let you know that they are locked, it's as if they were just a part of the scenery. This is pretty confusing at the start, especially since the characters that provide gameplay tips appear seldom and randomly. Also, dead characters aren't distinguished in any way in the menu, which is a bit confusing.

Conclusion:

Overall, this game is so much fun that I can't do anything else, but recommend it. An expanded version of this game could really be something special that would have the potential to become a classic. Given the issues, perhaps the rating should be a bit lower, but I had so much fun, that flaws aside, I can't score this any lower. I hope there's a remake/sequel someday!