A self-aware narratively focused murder mystery game | First Impressions - Murders on Budapest

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Just fresh from my review of another fourth wall breaking mystery game, now we have another mobile game in Murders of Budapest. This time it’s less of a detective point-and-click mystery and more of a murder mystery visual-novel this time around.

Murders of Budapest is a fairly simplistic game. No deep mechanics, no over complicated puzzles. It’s more of an interactive adventure story with some mini-games every now and then to spice up the gameplay. As for the presentation, the characters have cartoonish looks and the game is presented in cartoon-style visuals.

The dialogue and events are told in a messaging app style format, which the players can scroll around. There is no voice acting so prepare yourself for a 100% reading heavy experience for the entirety of the game. The use of a messaging app style format also adds to the game's immersive quality, as players may feel as though they are directly communicating with the game's characters and participating in the story as it unfolds in real-time.

Murders of Budapest really has something special cooking with the story as it got me hooked on after a few minutes or so. Despite the simplistic visuals and dialogue, it still manages to instill a creepy, if not scary, atmosphere while still maintaining that humorous aspect in tandem with the fourth-wall breaks.

One major downside of the game are the intrusive ads. Ads banners that appear at the bottom, and ads that play every now and then. Also, the game isn’t entirely free to play, even with the ads, you need “tickets” to make choices and they do run out pretty fast. Your only way to replenish Tickets to keep playing is to keep watching more ads, or purchase tickets directly. Which is a shame because the story really is interesting. Watching ads for the whole experience doesn’t really work because the game will also run out of ads to show you.