Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case from Shinyuden, Happymeal, and Undercoders is one worth checking out on Nintendo Switch. Check out our Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case review!
Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case from Shinyuden, Happymeal, and Undercoders is one worth checking out on Nintendo Switch. It’s a game that, as its name suggests, brings us a retro-style 8-bit-infused whodunnit visual novel detective type of an experience. Because of this, it’s certainly not going to be for everyone since it does require a bit of nostalgia to appreciate what the game is doing, but it’s one that you shouldn’t skip on Nintendo’s console. It’s a game that draws inspiration from Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club, which got remakes on the Nintendo Switch in 2021.
You’ll be taking on the role of a detective, who is joined by Ken Kaimeiji, his rookie but shrewd assistant. Your task will be to unravel the mystery that has shaken a secluded yet beautiful Japanese town. An unidentified body is found in a park in Ueno, Tokyo. While the police start to investigate, a jewel known as the Indigo Pearl is found, leading the pair of detectives to dig a bit deeper. This is, unfortunately, only the first of a series of murders in the province of Ise-Shima.
This one plays out like one of the detective games you would have been able to play on the Nintendo Entertainment System – a.k.a. the NES – way back in the day, but with some 21st-century quality-of-life improvements that can help ease you into the whole thing. You’ll be moving a cursor over the screen with the left analog stick as you use a series of commands to progress further into the game. These commands include Speak, Show, Call, Use Smartphone, Inventory, and Change Location. Oh, and, you know, Investigate.
Speak will allow you to talk to someone in the area. Show can be used to present evidence and other objects. Call is for calling people who might have information pertaining to the investigation at hand. Once you’ve called them, you can ask them questions by using the Ask command. Use Smartphone will search for something online or take photos. And no, there are no games to play on it! Inventory will let you check information or evidence collected. As for Change Locations, it will make it possible to move from your current location to another area available to you depending on how far along you are in the case.
Investigate will be the big one during your time with Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case. It’s the command you’ll need to use to, for example, take a closer look at the scene of the crime right at the start of your adventure! After Ken prompts you to get started, selecting Investigate will allow you to, say, review your surroundings, to which Ken says that no one witnessed what had happened, probably because everyone was in a rush to get to work. Investigate the ground, and Ken will let you know that it rained yesterday, so any footprints that existed were washed away. At least you’ll be able to find a broken pen!
If you continue to use the Investigate command, you’ll be able to check out the cause of death, which is kinda of hard to tell at that particular moment in the case. Ken mentions it’s hard to tell if it was an accident, a suicide, a murder, or something else. Who knows, he could have been drunk and fell into the pond! Checking the body will let you know he was a man in his 50s. Forensics also estimates the time of death at the night before – that would be March 29 – between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m.
You can customize your experience by going into the options section of the game by either playing with no filter, adding one of three different CRT filters, making everything black and white, adding an old LCD filter, having an image background or a black image around the 4:3 sized screen within the screen, and activate or deactivate the music, the SFX, as well as the old-school typing FX.
Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case brings us a retro-style 8-bit-infused whodunnit visual novel detective type of an experience. It’s a game that draws inspiration from Nintendo’s own Famicom Detective Club while offering some quality-of-life elements you’d come to expect from a game releasing in 2023. The game has Vol. 1 right there on its title, and after playing this game, I very much look forward to checking out a Vol. 2. Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case is out on Nintendo Switch with a $9.90 price tag, making it an easy one to recommend on the console.
Disclaimer
This Retro Mystery Club Vol. 1: The Ise-Shima Case is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Shinyuden.
