Murder by Number ( Oftenly mistyped as Murdered By Numbers or Murdered by the Numbers ) is Visual Novel Released in 2020 by Mediatonic and Played in Agust 2025 by me.
You play as Honor, an actress on a detective show turned real detective after her boss is sudenly killed. She is, of course, helped by Scout a sentient flying robot with amnesia and togheter they help solve 4 murders across 4 chapters.
The twist is that identifing clues, a pretty big of being a detective, is done by solving Nonograms puzzles. Nonograms (Also known as Paint by Numbers or Picross) is game, similar to sudoku, in which you are given a grid and the amount of filled squares in each line and collum and have to deduce the correct layout of the grid. There's a lot of them. This is not a problem for me as I love Nonograms and had already solved hundreds of them before even knowing of the existance of this game. The puzzles start small at 5x5 but quickly grow to 10x10, 15x15 and even 20x20 in the bonus puzzles. Weirdly all grid sizes are multiples of 5 and I have no Idea why, but this seems standard in other Nonograms games. There is also a hacking minigame where you must solve multiple 5x5 puzzles within a time limit and without marking empty spaces.
The visual novel part is pretty good, I really like the story and the characters and no one seemed too anoying. Besides Honor and Scout, there is also Becky, your collegue and bratty friend. K.C your gay best friend. And Detective Cross, who is always trying to stop you from solving the murders yourself, but in the end helps you. There is also some subplots with Honor's dead father and another with her abusive ex-husband, which I didn't like that much but it isn't very intrusive. Otherwise the tone is pretty light and makes you forget sometimes you saw a corpse a few minuts ago, but I don't take this as much of a negative. By the the I did care somewhat about a Honor and quite sme about Scout
The investigation is divided in 2 parts which go back and forth, looking for clues and talking to suspects. While looking for clues you enter a "scan mode" where you drag you throgh a static picture of the scenery while playing hot-cold with a detector. Once you find a clue you solve a aforementioned nonogram. When talking to suspects you can select a clue and ask a suspect about, allowing them to give you information about. If you give something unrelated they will simply spout a generic line saying they know nothing about it. This works mostly fine but there's some point&Click missing the obvious question moments.
While I'm mostly sure you can't softlock yourself or make it impossible to find the culprit, you can miss clues an by extension, puzzles. This is a bit of a problem because you gain points which increase your chapter grade. This grade influences how many extra puzzles you get. Not only are some clues very easy to miss the extra puzzles they unlock gate extra story moments.
The presentation is fine. The images are well drawn are there are quite a few per charachter, although there isn't anything you could call animation only cardboard cutout sliding. The music is also nothing to write home about, and you could easilyl. The exception to both of these is of course the intro, which is fully animated with a greate original song. I never skipped it when playing the game.
In conclusion Murder by Numbers is great game with a pretty nice story. You certainly must like nonograms to like this game, which I do a lot.
I really liked the music, the art/presentation, and the general game concept behind the whole thing. Felt like one of those really cool marriages of ideas that makes you think, "Wait, nobody's done this before?" As in it's so natural it feels obvious even though you'd likely never think of it.
Unfortunately I found everything else about the game to be fairly disappointing. The story stretched believability, the gameplay wasn't executed very well, and I experienced a bunch of glitches while playing that really soured me on the whole affair. But I'm glad you seemed to have a better time of it! It's a game I truly wanted to enjoy more than I did.
I played the first 2 or 3 cases and wasnt too excited to continue. It's a mid visual novel with mid nonograms.
On the visual novel side, it just feels like "we have ace attorney at home" with like maybe 10% of the charm and intrigue. The dialogue felt overwritten, but on the up side the jokes were usually pretty funny.
On the nonogram side, the puzzles feel like they were made by inexperienced designers. Puzzles don't have a good sense of difficulty progression, they feel like they were just drawn to fit the scenario and checked with a basic logic checker to make sure they're solvable, so they randomly feel either trivially easy, or difficult to the point of needing contradiction strategies even early game. The controls felt clunky with having to toggle between the different marking functions rather than just having a dedicated button for each one. I might just be spoiled by Jupiter's nonogram games which have perfect puzzle design and controls.
At the end of the day, I don't know who it's for. If you're a fan of either nonograms or visual novels, those aspects are going to feel distractingly weak. If you're new to either nonograms or visual novels, it's not a good introduction to either.
It's a fun game. It's one I've replayed a few times when I've needed a palate cleanser. Not mind-blowing, but there are a handful of games like it and none of them are as good.
Kinda frustrated that the game doesn't go on sale on Switch anymore, which is where I'd play this type of game. I heard that the pub,isher switched hands, and so support is different now, but not sure of the details.
Puzzles being in an increment of 5's is because it's kind of the "standard" and makes it easier to count cells. James from Score Studios explains it more in his video