Demons' Timeline

I tried the demo and immediately bought the full game. It was the perfect mix of routine (collecting hashtags) with mystery solving that actually required some thought and didn't come with handholding unless you asked for it. I thought the story was very clever and I was hooked enough to play the whole thing in 3 days. Definitely hope to see more like this from the devs!

Way better than I expected. Only gripe is that the chapter transition scenes are painful to look at

Demons' Timeline is an inventive supernatural detective game that takes the familiar experience of browsing social media and transforms it into an investigative puzzle. Developed and published by DigitalCats, the game places players in the role of L, a Cyber Detective tasked with uncovering the truth behind mysterious incidents involving people with supernatural abilities. These individuals are known as Demons, while the abnormal events connected to their powers are referred to as Paradoxes. Instead of visiting physical crime scenes, the investigation unfolds through digital information, giving the game a distinctive identity within the mystery genre. L does not work entirely alone. The detective is accompanied by Nyasuteria Hakouchi, a Demon whose supernatural abilities can assist during investigations. This partnership establishes an interesting contrast between rational detective work and paranormal phenomena. The cases may involve extraordinary powers, but solving them still depends largely on careful observation and logical reasoning. Players must determine what happened by examining the information people leave behind online, making the supernatural elements part of the myst…

This may well be one of my top games for this year. The overarching surrealism and heartwarming message felt somewhat like Umineko, while the deductive aspects scratched an itch similar to Type Help or Golden Idol. Add cute girls to the mix, and the only complaint I have is that I wish the game was longer. Absolute 10/10 in my book.

Make my brain works

Great deduction/information-gathering game where you solve mysteries by looking through social media posts. It's a very engaging game that had me glued to the screen for its entire runtime across one long evening as I kept solving just *one* more set of mysteries. Solving the mysteries is mostly very satisfying, though I admittedly wasn't as much a fan of some of the later, more complex mysteries that expect you to pore through previous puzzles for additional clues. At that point it started to feel like a memory game more than a deduction game, since there is just so much information to juggle (especially names!) The game touches on some pretty pertinent themes given its social media focus and it handles them with nuance. This is where the story shined the most in my opinion. On the other hand, there were also supernatural aspects to the story that I didn't enjoy quite as much. Overall an enjoyable deduction game that will satisfy fans of the genre and of similar games (Urban Myth Dissolution Center is a particularly good comparison).