The Kuon Island Nursery Rhyme Murders: Case Notes

I will start off this review with talking about the use of generative AI content within the game: It is difficult to tell how much the 'some' in the content disclosure is carrying that statement, but I would go as far to say pretty much all of the art looks like it originated from AI content given the inconsistencies and strange details. If you don't like it, steer away from the game, but if you can stomach it then here's the rest of my review. Spoilers ahead: [strike] Queue 'I wish there was a Mixed rating' option, though I'm leaning more towards negative here.[/strike] First and foremost: It's a Kinetic Novel, so just reading here. My play time includes reading through the entire game, as well as note taking to try and solve the mystery. If you aren't note taking, I would assume this would take you 90-120 minutes to read through. It has a gripping concept of a classical murder mystery: a cast of quirky geniuses and a series of locked room murders to cut them down one by one. However by the second half with the introduction of [spoiler] an AI simulator [/spoiler] it feels like it loses any of the steam that it had built up. The plot gets all twisted and directionless and while i…

I think this game used AI for art way more than stated in the AI content disclosure. It says that "some" art assets were rendered with AI first and then manually touched up, but in my opinion all images I have seen so far seemed to be AI generated and then maybe digitally painted over or something similar. In the first 15 minutes there were about 10 CGs (not exaggerated) with very strange details (or lack thereof) and especially weird framing, which made it hard to understand what was happening. One character also, noticeably, has six fingers in a very early CG (but not in subsequent ones, so it wasn't a conscious choice), which made it clear that there wasn't even that much effort put into refining the images. Personally, I really don't like generative AI being used for art and music. It it was really jarring when almost every image looked AI generated, to the point where i didn't want to read further, which is a bit disappointing because I really wanted to give this game a chance. I didnt get very far into the story, so I won't comment on that, but i think its important to let players know how much AI was really used.

Fun read for 2-3 hours. As noted by other negative comments, this is a murder mystery kinetic novel with rather poor deduction. The reveal has a strong asspull feeling to it and I doubt anyone will be able to correctly deduce the solution. But if you're like me and just read murder mystery for the ride, then this is a good VN with nice vibe and music. Character designs and arts still exude the same Renka vibe from prior games so I am not too bothered with AI usage. --- Renka's a solo dev afaik and the game is cheap; I don't see a problem with them using AI. It's either that or we're back to the age of royalty free assets / music.

I really loved the VN, was short but intense. Both the story and the message I received through it were extremely interesting and gave food for thought! I liked the music as well, especially the main theme which was my favorite.