Mohism: Battle of Words

As someone that loves detective games ala the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa series, as well as Wuxia films. this game proved the perfect combination! I loved every bit of this game... my only complaint is that the ending felt a bit short, I feel like one more case would have been perfect. I would love more games like this set in pre-modern China. I also loved the music, although there aren't too many tracks, so i'm sure some people could complain that it is too repetitive for their liking. I played this on Linux via Proton. I experienced some minor glitches. I found that that the game would crash randomly sometimes, but by chance when I played it without a network connection one time, I found it worked perfectly and I completed the game. Hence despite my 0.8h on record, I probably put in somewhere around 12-15h. I would definitely recommend this for everyone that likes detective games, wuxia, and graphic novels, although I wouldn't know how many people there are out there where this venn diagram intersects!

I've had a very good time playing this game! It nails the wuxia vibes and the Ace Attorney-style gameplay works surprisingly well in this setting. The Chinese-to-English translation is good, with some puns and jokes thrown in (which seems like a staple of any Ace Attorney-style game). It's not perfect, but at no point was I unable to follow what was being talked about. The art style is unique but I grew to really like it! And the voice acting is nice. The cross-examination is on a timer, but you get unlimited tries. So don't stress about the timer. Also, the game narrows down what pieces of evidence you can submit for the cross-examination which makes it easier to find relevant clues (but doesn't eliminate the challenge). One criticism I have of the game is that at certain points the game will ask you to make logical deductions where lots of concepts are floating on the screen and you have to click on the right ones. The concept is fine, but I think it must work better with Chinese characters because the sentences are hard to read in English because they wiggle around. Thankfully if you hold your mouse over them they pause. But I think that system could have been executed a litt…

What Mohism does as a detective-em-up is interesting, and it says something that I was compelled to play it all the way through. Ostensibly, it's an Ace Attorney-like evidence collection and contradiction finding game set in the start of Ming Dynasty China, though we're playing a bit fast and loose with historicity here. What really drew me in was the art, animations, and presentation. The characters are all done in this charming Glen Keane-meets-Chinese-ink style. Their posing from sprite to sprite is lovely to look at. I especially enjoyed XIong Antong, a bear-inspired bureaucrat that has a great variety of expressions and a charming shape design to him that made him fun to root against. The backgrounds swoop and sway in the wind, and I was certainly immersed in the setting. The story is well told and the crimes have the requisite number of twists and reversals to keep the moment-to-moment factfinding fresh. At the same time, I do think a little bit of the human element was missing - outside of the first case, I didn't feel all that much real connection to either the investigator(s), the victims, or the culprits. The story could sorely have done with a few more casual segm…

There's bugs in the game, especially in specific Rift sections where if you click on "retry" the game freezes and crashes.

A detective visual novel set in fantasy medieval China (wuxia style). The game is a visual novel with minimal animations. Backgrounds and characters are drawn as watercolor paintings with thick lines. This style works well with wuxia setting. The music is inspired by traditional styles. Voice-over is limited to primary story dialogues. Gameplay is similar to Ace Attorney - a visual novel with crime scene exploration, dialogues and deductions. The centerpieces of gameplay are the word battles, a more streamlined take on cross-examination from AA-series with time-limit. There is a difficulty setting that can decrease the time pressure. The game is mostly linear except 2 major choices at the end of prologue and the end of the game. These affect the conclusion of the story. The story fits into the wuxia genre with different political/martial arts sects and intrigue after accession of new Ming dynasty. The main character assists with investigations of murders and there is a background plot that connects them to a different degree. It was enjoyable and interesting and not as over-the-top as AA series. The localization is a mixed bag. The game starts in Chinese and must be swi…

Ace Attorney inspired game with a Wuxia setting