something that was short but got across the tone and the setting of the game.
“All of these things coalesce together, and when that happens, it becomes a really difficult thing to push back on. Because suddenly we’re solving all these problems, we’ve already got all these people… If I’d gone to them with one thing, say I’d only solved the pitch problem, It might have been a harder sell. But the fact that so many things had dovetailed together really just made like: ‘well, we kind of have to do this now!’”
Above: The LGTBQ+ representation is a large part of what makes the game so beloved
“So obviously, when we got Sugimori-san on board, it was a real ‘oh shit’ moment. It was great, but also like okay, we’re definitely going to get compared to Phoenix Wright now!” Sugimori’s involvement inadvertently resulted in my favourite aspect of Murder by Numbers: its opening theme song. When I first played the game just before its launch last year, I was wholly unprepared for its opening cinematic: an animated theme tune to the game, evoking the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood. It’s a damning indictment of the limitations of print media that I can’t share it here, and I wholeheartedly encourage you to seek it out – it’s beautiful. And, it turns out, it nearly didn’t exist at all. “To be honest with you, I only had the idea of doing it with about six months to go,” Fear reveals. “There were a number of origins to the theme song. The main one being, as the game got further along, I started thinking more and more about like... how am I going to pitch this game to people? Because I used to be a journalist, and I know that if you can’t deliver the elevator pitch, it probably means that your concept is a bit too woolly or whatever. “I’d tried describing it like ‘oh, it’s a detective Picross game that is set in the 90s, where there’s an actress and a floating robot…’ and just oh god, it wasn’t working. I couldn’t get the tone of the game across. “At the same time, Sugimori-san mentioned to me that
he really wanted to write a vocal theme for the game, and I couldn’t work out how I could make that work. The game deliberately ends on a really positive note, so an emotional song at the end isn’t going to work. And what would we display over this four minute song? The credits are only like a minute long, so that’s three minutes I’d have to fill. “So I was uhhming and aahing, but I was thinking that I’d
probably have to tell him no. But then I suddenly realised I could solve both of my problems. If we made the opening movie like the start of a TV show, and we did the vocals as the theme tune to that TV show, then we could have
Fear concedes that the opening animation and theme song might have been an expense Mediatonic hadn’t considered, but he (rightfully) has no regrets. “The reaction to it has been so overwhelmingly positive that I actually think the intro movie was the best thing I contributed to the project. That was the best decision I made, I think.”
Development on the game was, as Fear tells it, quite smooth – with little, if any pushback from the leadership team at Mediatonic. While he recalls challenges of juggling Murder by Numbers alongside other projects, Fear describes the game’s development as “pretty clear sailing.”
A WARM HUG Which seems appropriate, given Fear’s motivation for making the game in the first place. There weren’t any ‘design pillars’ in the traditional sense, but Fear had a number of goals he was working towards regardless. “There were a number of principles that I tried to go by,” he says. “For example, I didn’t want there to be a fail state. I didn’t want to make it so that you could get it severely wrong and have to replay things. One of my guiding stars was that I wanted to make a relaxing game – a game that I’d want to play when I was feeling low, and it would be comforting and reassuring. The idea of doing anything that punished the player was a complete no-no. “Beyond that, we always knew we were essentially combining two different audiences, and we’d have to balance the game between the two. It couldn’t become too much of an adventure game with pixel hunting and combining every item, because that would be irritating to Picross players.
“But then at the same time, you had to think about the adventure game players. There were times where we considered having more involved adventure game aspects, but I was very keen on boiling the idea down to its absolute core essence.
“And just doing that rather than getting distracted about putting in other things that we could do, because I felt that that would have thought that given our resources and our time, that was our best route of action.”
48 | MCV/DEVELOP January 2022
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