Yamamura Misa Suspense: Kyoto Kurama Sansou Satsujin Jiken

Overview

Kyouto Anba Sansou Satsujin Jiken (京都鞍馬山荘殺人事件) is a murder mystery adventure game based on writings of Misa Yamamura, a Japanese writer of murder mystery novels. The protagonist of the story is Akiko Sonoyama (園山千晶), freelancer who finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery after the son of the host dies during the dinner right after drinking the wine. The game uses live-action videos and actors and shows the player protagonist in 3rd-person during investigation, similar to other games of such era, such as The Beast Within or Phantasmagoria 2. During gameplay, the full-screen videos appear in the center of the screen with surrounding window showing various action icons and game progress. While the player character appears during cut-scenes and dialogues, navigating environment is done using 1st-person perspective. During dialogues player has a list of questions one can ask with replies being a set of live-action videos of certain character addressing the player. 15 years after the 3DO game release, the PSP remake with the same title was released. The main difference there is that live actors have all been removed and characters were replaced with silhouettes and game interface changed to look like a mystery visual novel but with a selectable actions such as talk or inquire which make the game less of a typical visual novel and only resemble it in graphical presentation by using static backgrounds with dialogue text over it.