So this title is not yet completely, still one episode to go. But there has been a great many things added up for now and I feel that after playing it through I should give my little view on things. So join me everyone as we look at "The 13th killer".

Story

You play as Eva, a youngster that has just enrolled in a new school. However almost right of the bat as you arrive, it seems that this school has plenty of mysteries that surrounds it and soon things take a drastic turn for the worse.

I'll be very frank, the story is not keeping me interested. It's certainly not the lack of story, do not get me wrong, it is rather that there are so many pieces but they simply don't seem to fit together (if they will by the last episode that would be a miracle!). The story moves at a very rapid phase, almost throwing itself onto you rather than easing you into what the game has to offer and as soon as one story piece comes in another jumps onto it and so this game ended up looking more like a cluttered mess when it came to the story perspective. I can't say if it will continue like that, as said, only the first of the episodes are done but so far, it is not shaping up to go easy or logical on the players.

To make a very personal nitpick on the story, some of the story aspects come right out of nowhere and way too early. I won't spoil what or where but some really confidential and very "taboo" story information comes slapped in your face within the first 10 min and it is harped up to a "oh welp, main character just checked a file sitting out in the open of a library". This is quite frankly just a rather poorly executed way of getting exposition out. So a tip would be: confidential information of very high value should be found in a place that is logical, not in the open where it would be more logical that anyone could find it.

Characters

Now there is a large set of characters here. But let's remind ourselves that large amount of characters does not necessarily mean fleshed out and likeable. In just the first 10 min of game play your are introduced to around 15 characters and all you really get to know is their name. Sure there are some snippets of dialogue but it does not really give them a personality as far as I was concerned. And to top it off within the next coming 10 min two of them were already dead.

It saddens me to say that most of them came off as cardboard cut outs simply there to fill a role in the plot. It is certainly not an easy task to introduce so many characters and flesh them out enough to even be called characters and simply not place holders with names. In correlation with the story I can not see how this could be fixed, I would personally say drop a few of them but I have come to understand that for a plot reason they are all needed.

Now I will say that the characters are not exactly terrible in character, they just don't seem to have character at all to speak of.

Gameplay

Now there are a few things here to speak of. For most part it is the standard moving and puzzles of finding items that will advance your playthrough and this is no trouble at all. Sure sometimes I went insane running around looking for an item since there were no real indication where items would be found or not (I'm looking at you lockpick of doom!) but quite frankly I can't complain, this game was made in the spirit of the old games where one isn't just given a huge blinking red light for everything.

The other part is the chases. Oh I really don't like this mechanic and how it is used for some parts. Now some are fine actually, you're given plenty of time to move and the enemy is not faster than the road runner! But when you activate some tiles to get a message to continue, sometimes the enemy would catch me and even though I was meant to transit to a new screen I would end up dead because the enemy would touch me while the message was still on screen. Also during a chase scene later in the game you can go to a door only to be told you need a key, here the enemy can trap you in a narrow corridor to the door and you'll be killed because you can't shove them out of the way. Kind of a pain in the ass that one.

Maps

Oh, I'm in a tie about the maps. On one hand the smaller maps are rather great, nicely fit with objects that makes it look roomy but spacious enough to allow the players to move without any trouble at all. Quite frankly, got no complaints about the tinier maps.

However the big maps are almost on the verge of terrible for me. And I understand, it is hard to make big maps without them ending up as wast spacious empty blocks! Too bad most of these maps suffers from it, feeling too big and simply taking up space.

As for a light nit pick, I really did not fancy the stairs, specially not on the second floor, it looked kind of weird the way they were structured. However pulling of that structure is hard in on itself so I can look past that really.

Sound

I will only speak of this briefly because I only have a few things to say. I've said it before and I'll say it again until I turn blue. Don't. Use. Sound clips. From. Other. Games. Specially not when those other games are big names that certainly makes me feel more in the mood to pick up one of those titles. I'm not picking on this to be mean but it is better to even run with the free sound clips that can be found out there than to jump onto a big title, the only thing you'll get is people snapping their finger and saying "oh I know which game this comes from" and that can give sort of a cheap feeling to the entire thing.

Conclusion

Geez, I don't like going hard on a game but I spent a good amount of time in this one and I felt I needed to share this with the creators. I know that you're working still on this project so I hope you can take some of the things to heart. Believe me, I know, it is never fun to realize that your maps are too big or that some story aspects might not fly the best but it's better to take some distance and just relax for a couple of days and try to look at it again. I can already see that you've got a good grasp on the things going on here so I'm certain you'll pull it off!

Oh, and a minor thing, the translation is kind of poor. I understand, it's not easy at all but there were even some parts where I stepped onto a tile and it wasn't translated at all along with a lot of typos. I do think however that you'll get to fixing this up before this game is complete ^^