The Zodiac Trial

If you like death game or detective visual novels (Danganronpa, Zero Escape, Ace Attorney, etc), you will likely enjoy The Zodiac Trial. Just be aware this is more of an amateur production, so expect things like spelling errors, bugs, logical inconsistencies, etc.

Actually the silliest, goofiest, game I've ever played. Wasn't expecting anything great until my boy Rooster ended racism. 10/10 writing, absolutely adore.

I’ll begin by addressing what will likely be a deciding factor for most people. If you’re looking for gameplay that’s a collection of escape rooms in the same vein as the Zero Escape series, or seek interactive crime scene investigations, gathering evidence and piecing it together to figure out the murderer akin to the Danganronpa series, then you’re best clicking away now. While both those series are visual novels in their own right, The Zodiac Trial is all visual novel. There are plenty of puzzles and crime scene investigation, but they’re all built around words, leaving you to figure things out in your own head and select the correct options in a series of choice boxes. So as long as you’re good with getting your entertainment exclusively through reading, then good news, you get to read on! There are three things I look for in a death game: 1 - a cast of big personality characters each with a secret to hide 2 - a game with defined rules aimed at bringing out those secrets 3 - a gaming arena that’s interesting to explore The Zodiac Trial delivers on the first two with merit, and while the setting likely suffers from budgetary constraints, it’s good enough in light of how strong the storytelling is. The death game works as such. Twelve characters have 12 rounds to cross a board of 24 squares. They have to make one move each round or else face immediate execution. The basic move is to go forward a single square, or they can instead use a special ability – one unique to each of them, the rest activatable by anyone via codes hidden in the locked puzzle safes around the school they’re trapped in. Death occurs to anyone not at the finish line at the end of the round somebody first crosses it, so as long as they all finish together they all live. However, 24 squares and only 12 rounds means that to get everybody out alive they have to combine their abilities and work together to find the hidden codes, which is what they aim to do … or so they think at first, because each of them also has a trait, and two of those traits have separate win conditions that don’t align with everybody crossing the finish line together. Needless to say, chaos quickly breaks out as bodies start piling up and the team scrambles to figure out who the traitors are. Decisions made in the first few rounds determine who the two traitors are, and each of the twelve players has their own path – yes, your character can also be made a traitor, and yes, your path involves setting traps to murder everybody else in order to survive … and yes, it’s brilliant. I cannot praise enough how much attention to detail the creator has put into how it all comes together. Twelve characters is an ambitious cast alone, but the layers of complexity in the mechanics of how the death game plays go so deep that it has no right whatsoever to work, and yet it does. Each path is entirely unique, and objects used in one path will pop up in the background of other routes, giving you that little extra thrill as you piece together the greater narrative being told. There being two traitors at a time does have the unfortunate side effect of causing you to know who the traitors are in later routes, but even then, there are plenty of surprises weaved in to keep you on your toes – the traitors are not always the primary focus of the paths. There’s even a clever reason why you’re playing the game twelve times over, and while I won’t spoil it, that the author chose to address this shows the level of care they’ve given to making it all as believable as possible. And if that isn’t enough, once you’ve completed the true path, you get an epilogue where you play a whole other death game to not only uncover who the mastermind behind them is, but also solve an old murder that was the reason the first one existed. And it all makes sense! I believe this is the creator’s first game, and I don’t know if they’ve written books before this, but this story would be an impressive feat to pull off for even an experienced author. My only complaint is that I wish there were more images of the murder scenes. I appreciate it’s hard to balance between shocking and gratuitous, and the budget again likely plays a role, since multiple murder scenes across twelve stories will rack up some hefty artist fees, but it did become noticeable the amount of times you’d stumble into a shocking scene that was described in detail across 5-10 text boxes all on a black screen. There is occasionally an extra sprite/picture beyond the standard upper-body avatars, and it works really well when it happens, but I’d have just liked more of it. The visual appeal of visual novels doesn’t hold much weight when you don’t have the visuals, y’know? But that’s a small gripe in what is an excellent game. I went into this expecting some cheap dumb fun to play for an hour a night to wind down with after other adventures, but it was so good that it not only became my primary focus, but had me going old school with a pen and notepad to help piece things together.

Aight, so I liked this game. And I really liked it until I got to the true ending. The true ending was just... Absurd. I feel like, if the game had ended right before the true ending, I'd ended up loving this game rather than just liking it. But it really dragged the game down; I suppose, sometimes, not having the answers leads to a more satisfying ending than having them. Even then, I would still recommend this game. It's not a perfect game; the cases in the game often don't lead to "aha" moments, but more "how was I supposed to figure that out" moments, but it's not so bad that it's not enjoyable, and besides the true ending, most cases made sense once explained. I think the main issue with a lot of the mysteries in the game was that, often, you either weren't given enough info or you were just barely introduced to the evidence required to piece things together in passing. And even then, stringing the the evidence together to fit the exact correct scenario was often tough. Sometimes, the evidence required to solve the mysteries were very spatial, auditory or otherwise 'kind of required one to be there'; like a sound actually being computer generated versus being real. Not a single person IRL would mistake a computer generated soundbite for a real sound, not unless both the soundbite and the speakers were of exceptional quality. 'Evidence' like this wasn't too infrequent in the mysteries. There's also items whose effects are explained, yet even when explained, it's not like the narrators of the explanations are reliable; they're figuring things out as they go, just as you are. So when you hear something like (non-spoilers, don't worry): "Saying this magic word immediately makes you pass out". Well, what does immediately mean? 1-3 seconds? 0 seconds? How precise is it? Do you make a sound as you pass out? Will your memory be affected or not? When will you wake up? In the reveals, unanswered elements like this are assumed to have answered, though you the player were never really given those answers and hence couldn't really piece together the answers to the mysteries yourself. And sometimes, the contraptions that they come up with just kind of sound... Absurd? [spoiler]Like, I don't fully understand this even after it's been explained, but one of the people hangs a gun with a piece of string, taped to a block of ice, that when melted lets the gun go and causes the gun to go off??? I feel like there's so many variable that could go wrong with that setup. Ice has almost no friction; wouldn't the string fall out? And in setting it up, you're touching this ice quite a bit. Wouldn't it melt rather fast? And when the ice even starts melting, due to low friction, it would almost immediately be unable to be hold properly down by the tape at all??? And how do you guarantee the gun goes off? So yeah, I'm confused and bewildered. Oh, and the clue to all this was, 'a bit of water on the tiled roof' and 'there is a string on the desk', tape wasn't mentioned, the gun never being found so hence not being evidence besides 'a gunshot which hit the door and no one else'. Of course, the first logical conclusion would be the aforementioned contraption; naturally! Am I stupid? I don't think I'm stupid? But maybe? >.<[/spoiler] Taking the above into consideration, I think it's best to treat this as a sort of mystery story with a reveal at the end; not one where you fully piece things together as you read, but one where you piece a few things together and then get wowed once you hear the revelation. It's just that, the slight 'quizzing' of every investigation makes it seem like you're supposed to figure things out; and unless I'm significantly dumber than the average person (which is plausible I guess, lol), you most likely just won't figure out the mysteries on your own most of the time. All in all though, I had fun, and I can recommend this.

Stupendous story. Loved every second of it, and just as the routes started to get predictable the true ending really threw me for a loop. Admittedly the game suffers a bit from its budget but for just a small group of people to have put this all together (and just one person writing, directing and programming everything) it's very impressive and in my opinion does quite a few things better than the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series from which the creator drew inspiration. Highly recommend.

I have to say, I really enjoyed this game. I've played most of the larger budget death game type stuff (999, Dangonronpa, Raging Loop, etc) and wasn't expecting much from such a small studio, but this is actually a really good game. The backgrounds are a little funky looking and there is a crazy amount of grammatical errors, but you get used to it, or maybe just so engrossed in the game you stop even noticing. Every route is fun, and while some are maybe better than others none were significantly worse or made me want to put it down. I'm actually surprised to see I only played for 16 hours, this game must have taken up so much of my brain-space over the week I played it that I thought I played it for much more. If you're looking for a fun game with many different routes and endings, I would definitely recommend!

The Zodiac Trial es una novela visual al estilo de Zero Escape (particularmente inspirada por 999) y Danganronpa. Un juego mortal con personajes variopintos intentando encontrar la forma de sobrevivir. Todas las rutas que puedes tomar en el juego presentan escenarios muy diferenciados entre si que dan lugar a muchos juegos mentales entre los participantes de los que el autor te quiere hacer parte. Se siembran muchas pistas a lo largo del juego que estan pensadas para que las desentierres y logres ir resolviendo los diferentes misterios que hay, tanto los que solo ocurren en una ruta como el gran misterio que envuelve toda la obra. Si te gustó 999, probablemente también te guste Zodiac Trial. Y aunque no te gusten algunas de las partes mas locas de los misterios en este tipo de juegos, tal vez el estilo menos extravagante de este titulo (quitando un par de rutas) haga que puedas disfrutar de la historia. Los unicos puntos negativos que he encontrado son errores en el texto (faltas de ortografía, cambiar el nombre de un personaje por el de otro en alguna escena...) y pocos dibujos , con muchas escenas repitiendo graficos o con pantalla en negro (comprensible por ser un titulo de bajo presupuesto). Si estas pegas no te suponen un problema, ¡juegalo!

gud

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I'm a big lover of indie VNs and of any media about death games, and The Zodiac Trial scratched those itches perfectly. What it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in a compelling cast of characters and an engaging, complex branching storyline that's remarkably ambitious for such a small operation. I couldn't put this game down until I'd seen all fifty-four endings. The only thing I wasn't totally sold on was the true ending, which I don't think quite matches up with the quality of the rest of the game in its pacing and big reveal, but I still felt satisfied. If you're on the fence about buying this game, especially if you're a fan of the Zero Escape series, Your Turn To Die, etc. you should absolutely give it a try - I think this is a hidden gem that deserves a lot more attention!