Murders on the Yangtze River rushes onto Steam

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Japan may have shared Ace Attorney's Phoenix Wright with the world, but now China has introduced its own skilled investigator in OMEGames Studio's newly released Murders on the Yangtze River.

The star of this game isn't a practicing attorney, but John Shen did study law in the early 1900s in London. His brother was there too, studying biology, before his life was cut prematurely short, his body found dead in his dormitory. The police ruled the incident a suicide, but when "Shen stumbled upon a newly published detective novel on Shanghai News that depicted a murder scene identical to his brother's death," he became convinced that the writer was somehow involved and returned home to China to investigate. What begins as a single case, however, eventually broadens into an entire series of mysteries occurring along the titular river. To succeed, the "refined gentleman" protagonist will need to make strategic use of his "sharp intellect" while suppressing the "darker side to his personality," with help from his "vivacious assistant, Frankie ... a beacon of positivity who is always eager to use his technological inventions in their investigations."

As with its inspiration, Murders on the Yangtze River features a combination of traditional adventure-like sleuthing and visual novel-styled sequences with over 800,000 words of dialogue. It's presented in a beautiful ink wash aesthetic, like a "landscape painting of China's mountains and rivers from a hundred years ago" as you travel along the Hunan mountains. Solving each individual case, such as the one in which a worker from the Hanyang Iron Works is rumoured to have sacrificed himself to the gods by flinging himself into vat of "burning hot ... molten steel," will involve using "logical reasoning and deduction skills" to solve puzzles, uncover clues, interrogate suspects, draw connections between evidence, confirm alibis and expose contradictions in people's testimonies. Caution must be shown when confronting potential suspects, as multiple endings are possible depending on your performance. All told, the six distinct cases, plus the overarching mystery of Shen's brother's death, are projected to take about 10-15 hours to complete.

Originally released only in its native language in January, the localized English version of Murders on the Yangtze River is now complete and available on Steam for Windows and Mac, along with a demo containing the game's first introductory case. 

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