The Mermaid Mask

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Soooooo... When's the next one? :3

Mermaid Mask is puzzle-solving-meets-detective-em-up at its finest. Every aspect is polished to an absolute mirror sheen. The dev's previous adventure Tangle Tower was an almost-quite-there puzzler that banked on its excellent visuals and engaging dialogue to keep folks going through some occasionally difficult-to-follow plot; Mermaid Mask has no such reservations about its recommendation. The characters are universally engaging - both in terms of their animation and their personalities. Stock archetypes - the fez-wearing occultist, the wacky aeronaut, the supernaturally inclined orphan - are polished, faceted, and given this really loving depth in almost every animation, line read, and tangential aside. I particularly love how certain characters' animations will cut mid-sentence due to the inflection placed on a certain line - just to add a little bit of oomph, to make their reactions feel just that more human. Other VNs I've played have not had as much care placed into their whole cast as one Mermaid Mask character gets in his whole animation set. The story is compelling from a high-level view and at the line-by-line level; well-paced, witty without being overly quirky, occasionally quite emotional. Our main duo are quippers about the strange circumstances they find themselves on, but you're never led to believe they don't care. The writing is so good that even when characters simply pause, you truly have many things to consider is it a muted concern, a held, self-aggrandizing breath, silent reproach? Each suspect has reasons to have committed the crime - some understandable, some less so - but the great achievement the game's writing makes is that by the end I really didn't want to pull the mask off the culprit, because doing so would untangle the ravel of strange affections this cast held for each other. I could go on at length about everything else, but one particular standout was the music. I've been listening to J.D.'s theme off and on for days, it's that good. Holy cow.