Reviews by Tabitha

Originally posted at intfiction.org on September 25, 2025

This is a visual novel that drops you straight into the life of the PC with little to help orient you. In short order you meet a virtual boss and a character that seems to be an AI that lives in the PC’s head, and learn that the PC is happy with her low-level waste management job and has no interest in climbing the ranks (which, it’s later revealed, does seem like it comes with more risks than rewards).

What is “waste management” in this sci-fi world? It seems to be collecting detritus from various planets, cataloging it, and then destroying it. But it was never clear to me why this is being done. Why is this corporation “managing waste” on a bunch of long-abandoned planets? In a way the finds are treated as archaeological objects, with the cataloguing component of the process, but the motivation behind documenting rather than just destroying is never elaborated. Also, when the gameplay shifts to you going on these search-and-collect missions, you’re only allowed to take one object from each, which seems entirely counter to the idea of waste management, and is likewise never explained.

The heart of the story, though, is the PC’s relationships—with Maria, the AI she (from what I gathered) designed and had implanted in her own brain, and with the two mission companions you get to choose between. I replayed to experience both paths, one with the company golden child turned defector turned reeducated drone (or so the PC initially believes) Zinnia, and the other with the volatile former racer, now condemned criminal Raven. In my playthroughs, at least, the PC develops an attachment to whichever one you choose, which happens largely without player input; the main player choices are of which piece of junk you salvage on each trip, and from peeking at the walkthrough, these are what determine which ending you’ll get.

On the Raven path, my choices led to (Spoiler - click to show)me forming an attachment to him, ripping the AI mechanism out of my head, and preparing for the two of us to flee together… only for me to ultimately betray him to the company, turning him in and ending the story with my AI back in place. I’m not sure what it was about my choices of objects that led to this dramatic series of events. The Zinnia path, in contrast, was much more subdued—the PC’s opinion of her slowly changed, and (Spoiler - click to show)the two ended by professing love for each other. This path also had more tension with Maria; her presence seemed like more of a burden to the PC in this route, with regular interludes emphasizing that.

While the sprites are original art, the backgrounds are photographs of real places (mostly buildings), some with real people in them, which made them a hard sell for portraying abandoned sci-fi planets. Maybe this was on purpose, the game using its sci-fi trappings to comment on real life, but if that is the case, the parallels it’s drawing definitely went over my head.

So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but my main feeling coming away was one of confusion. The company the PC works for seems to be powerful and evil, but I was never sure what they were actually doing aside from sending employees on these waste management missions. What do higher-ranking employees do? What does it mean to be a “defector” in this world?

I’m not sure if this is the kind of VN where getting all the endings will unlock a “true” ending that sheds new light on everything that’s gone before; I only played each path once, but the walkthrough reveals they both have a variety of possible endings. Having spent an hour and a half with the game already, though, I wasn’t particularly motivated to replay several more times in order to collect all the endings. I may dip back in at least once, though, to at least see just how different the outcomes of each path can be.

I really liked this one... up until the ending. I enjoyed inhabiting the main character and exploring the unique situation they (she?) found themself in, pulled from academia into the military to work on a top-secret translation assignment, with the shadow of their deceased war-hero mother constantly looming over them, influencing everyone's perceptions and expectations. But ultimately, the payoff was disappointing. In my first playthrough, after making basically zero translation progress, the outcome of the climactic moment came down to a random guess--which I got wrong, to disastrous consequences.

Fortunately I had enabled the "back" button and could easily try different choices until I got a "good" ending, but even this one felt very abrupt and perfunctory and was unsatisfying. Both endings referenced a character who I hadn't heard of before, leaving me feeling like I had missed something important. But with the "save" function broken, replaying over and over until I discovered the key path(s) felt like more trouble than it was worth (until today, when I opened the JS file and poked around a bit to get some guidance. But obviously, having to resort to that is not ideal!). This feels like a game where you need to see multiple paths to get the full picture, but it fights against itself by not making it easy to do so.

I had fun playing this one, but ultimately came away with a rather poor impression of it after looking at the walkthrough. Initially, I really enjoyed exploring the possibility space, both as far as testing out commands and, on replaying, being more strategic and seeing if any of my strategizing would pay off. After five playthroughs (some of which, admittedly, were not actual attempts to do well), I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was and wasn't possible. But when I cracked open the walkthrough out of curiosity, I saw multiple possible actions that I'd never thought of.

The walkthrough starts out with a list of useful commands, which I think should have been included in the game itself; players could have a choice of whether to view them or not, but I think the player should definitely be made aware of their existence. Especially because I learned from the walkthrough that some of my attempted actions that had been rejected by the game were actually possible, I just hadn’t been using the right phrasing. Implementing more synonyms and/or including helpful failure messages that point the player toward the correct wording would help with that issue, too.

But what's a bigger deal to me is that, pre-walkthrough, I’d concluded that ending the game (Spoiler - click to show)with some level of failure was inevitable—whether the empire being completely overtaken, or its borders shrinking. And I liked that; the game seemed to be saying (Spoiler - click to show)“No matter what you do, empires are doomed to fall.” But the walkthrough presents (Spoiler - click to show)a series of commands that leads to an ending where you've not only held onto your current territory, you've expanded and conquered others'.

Given that this is the only path presented in the walkthrough, clearly the author considers it the ideal ending. With Drew Cook's essay on "The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode" fresh in my mind, I couldn't help feeling that my whole experience of the game had been deflated by this authorial intervention. My own interpretation went out the window, replaced by "Oh, it's just a game where (Spoiler - click to show)you win by growing your empire." The game's fantasy world is very generic/traditional, with barbaric tribes harassing your borders and women appearing only as courtesans or brides. Before, when left to interpret the game myself, I could see these as purposeful choices; now, though, they just seem lazy.

This is the third mystery IF game by thesleuthacademy. I enjoyed the previous ones, and I had a good time with the exploration and deduction process in this one too, ultimately successfully figuring out the killer, motive, and means (although I did miss the actual murder weapon). Some of the criticisms I had of the previous game, The Case of the Solitary Resident (my review) were resolved here, making for overall smoother gameplay, although some of them still apply (namely, the lawnmower nature and not distinguishing between visited and unvisited links).

But the biggest issue with this one is something I only mentioned in passing in that last review. There’s a limitation to these games in that the scenarios and the characters all exist solely in service to the deduction puzzle. With this one in particular, that setup really didn’t work for me. While we meet a whole cast of characters, with names and emotions and secrets, in the end, all that matters is finding whodunnit; the details—the human details, that is—aren’t important.

This is a straight-up spoiler of the solution, so be forewarned: (Spoiler - click to show)at the end, having successfully solved the case, we’re told: “Lionel Litchfield, a workaholic [and the murder victim], barely had a social life. He ended up having an affair with the young Marguerite Hansel [the culprit].” Marguerite is Lionel’s child’s governess. Lionel is married. So these lines reveal him as both a cheating husband and an employer who’s fine with starting a sexual relationship with a young woman in his employ.

The short story A Jury of Her Peers, in which (Spoiler - click to show)two women choose not to share their conclusion that a neighbor murdered her abusive husband with the local sheriff, came to mind as I thought about this game. In The Litchfield Mystery, (Spoiler - click to show)Marguerite doesn’t get a jury, of her peers or otherwise; she gets a male police detective, embodied by me the player, whose only pursuit is of law-defined justice. There’s no option to take the power imbalance implicit in an employer-employee relationship, in the even-more-sexist-than-today society of 1937, into consideration; neither is there any concern for what Marguerite’s fate may be as a young women convicted of murder at that time. I think a version of the game that did consider these things, and perhaps let you choose whether or not to reveal your findings after solving the case, would be a stronger one.