Tyrion Cuthbert is an interesting take on Ace Attorney, one definitely more on the Visual Novel side of things with less focus on the puzzle elements. Taking the mantle of a defense lawyer in a world full of magic and mysteries, you investigate crimes, find evidence, then tackle witnesses in court trying to find contradictions by pressing statements, thinking through events, and using some mystical powers of yours as well. I had a really good time with it!
The game shines on the story and setting side of things, I really got drawn in by some strange occurings that happened early on and led to some good payoff at the end of the game, the cases lead well one into another and the game builds up in some traditional Ace Attorney fashion. The characters are fun and well written, and the mysteries are good enough to keep you speculating and trying to figure them out. I’m not going to explictely describe what happens, because this is part of the fun of playing visual novels, but it resolves in a satisfying manner.
The trial scenes are good enough, sometimes you’ll get stuck on a leap of logic that just doesn’t jump to mind and you’ll try every solution before figuring it out, and that feels kinda bad, or you might know what happened but the game really wants you to explain it in a specific way, and you do have a lot of evidence to go through, with lists of characters and spells, but most of it feels like red herrings. This is ultimately saved by the fact that you have no real failure state in the game, most scenarios have no ‘health meter’ to speak of, and when they are present failure just means restarting the section. I perticularly enjoyed the sentence-completing minigame, it’s fun sometimes for the main character in an ace attorney game to figure things out on their own without the evidence.
Walking around and investigating is also good enough, the game might sometimes get really specific with a “talk to everyone and inspect everything before something else happens and you can move forward”, but it also doesn’t happen that often. The writing is good and the banter between characters keeps the whole thing interesting until the end.
My only real issue with the game is that some aspects felt a twinge unpolished and it was really jarring whenever they occured. Things like the “OBJECTION” voiceclips having poor audio balancing and kinda sizzling through the music, character body parts appearing for one frame in front of the UI. These are really small issues and I 100% get that game development is a mess, but overall if these are my only gripes with the product as a whole, it’s pretty good! Tyrion Cuthbert is dope, if you enjoy Ace Attorney you really should check it out!
