Murder by Numbers on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information

Solve Pixel Puzzles to find clues. Use those clues to interrogate witnesses. Work your way to the truth... ...and uncover the mystery of Murder by Numbers!

Murder by Numbers is a investigation, visual novel and puzzle game developed by Mediatonic and published by The Irregular Corporation.
Released on March 06th 2020 is available only on Windows in 2 languages: English and Japanese.

It has received 1,571 reviews of which 1,316 were positive and 255 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.0 out of 10. 😎

The game is currently priced at 12.49€ on Steam, but you can find it for 2.00€ on Instant Gaming.

The Steam community has classified Murder by Numbers into these genres:

Investigation Visual Novel Puzzle Female Protagonist Interactive Fiction LGBTQ+ Detective 2D Story Rich Comic Book Conversation Anime Colorful Cartoony Crime Logic Mystery Adventure 1990's Conspiracy

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at Murder by Numbers through various videos and screenshots.

System requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS *: Windows 7 or higher (64 bit)
Processor: Intel Core i3 or higher
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 660 (2048 MB) or Radeon R9 285 (2048 MB) - Integrated GPUs may work but are not supported.
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 2 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible

User reviews & Ratings

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

March 2025

This game really is Ace Attourney meets Picross. It's super chaming and the story is great. I love the characters. Go play it.

Jan. 2025

Right from the outset, the game shows it has personality and quality from its introductory video and song. They ended up being one of the things I looked forward to the most when booting up the game each time. I really enjoyed the soundtrack and the animation quality throughout the game. The writing was fun and the characters/dialogue were enjoyable. I play Picross games on my phone, and these were much more difficult, so if you enjoy these types of puzzles, I would also recommend it for that reason. I picked up a few new techniques for solving these types of puzzles while playing the game. Act 3 was the only frustrating part because there are a couple puzzles that are easy to miss (see the forums). The last thing I would say is if you're considering playing on the Steam Deck, it controls really well on the platform. I was able to speedily zip around each puzzle using the D-pad and it wasn't a laborious process at all, since I was concerned it might be better on mouse/keyboard before I started playing it for the first time.

Sept. 2024

Murder by Numbers is a visual novel styled detective/mystery game, that uses Picross puzzles as its method of gameplay. The story premise starts simple, the main protagonist is a detective-playing actress that gets herself involved in a murder case, after meeting SCOUT, a robot with visual recognition functions, that has mysteriously awoken with his memories lost, they team up together to solve the many incidents they somehow end up getting involved in, taking a mantle of a wannabe detective duo while trying to learn more about the past of SCOUT. The gameplay options are simple and concise. When the situation allows for it you can move through different locations relevant to the current chapter, question people and present evidence to them to get information or reactions. Additionally, you can scan the locations for any suspicious looking spots, here is where the Picross tie in happens, to scan for items, you'll have to solve Picross puzzles that will reveal evidence that may help the ongoing investigation. That is the simple explanation of the game, though I have a few comments about it. Firstly, besides the puzzles you'll encounter through the chapters, there are some extra set of puzzles on the "SCOUT's Memories" section. The way these are unlocked are by reaching different "Rankings" on each chapter, earning points as you complete puzzles. The thing is that if you happen to use hints during a chapter, you will miss out on bonus points, which from my experience of using only a few hints in Chapter 1, will not allow you to get the S rank and unlock all bonus puzzles for that chapter. Forcing you to replay the chapter and beat all the puzzles without using hints if you want to unlock them. This previous realization was annoying as they don't tell you this prior to experiencing it on your own, so it lead to being careful on the remaining chapters and use save scumming if I needed a clue on a puzzle, so that I could clear them "without hints" and get all bonus points. Even IF you do this, there are a few missable puzzles that can cause this frustration if you progress the story too fast in some situations. Another slight con is that there's no way to replay the puzzles found in the chapters unless you replay them completely, possibly a "Gallery" where you could access them would have been a good addition. Besides these minor gripes the game was very enjoyable, most cases were interesting and engaging, and it wraps up nicely for the few lingering questions that arise through the story. If you're doing the puzzles on your own then most of the playtime will be spent in them, the story on the surface is not incredibly long, but by the end it's interesting enough with its theme and characters.

Aug. 2024

If you like nonogram/picross puzzles and ace attorney style story games mixed with puzzles, you will probably enjoy this game. If you only want the puzzles, steer clear as the pace of the story is slow and you will need to wade through a lot of it to get to the puzzles themselves.

July 2024

First things first: my play time is not accurate. I would often get up and get distracted doing other things since there's no time penalties or time related achievements. Secondly: it's very common to miss a puzzle in chapter 3 and missing it prevents you from getting S Rank. Make sure you check your locations after speaking to the other characters to make sure SCOUT doesn't have more he can investigate in the area. Like others have pointed out, it's more Ace Attorney than Picross, but unlike Ace Attorney the stories are more straight forward. I found myself solving a lot of the "crimes" very early on while Honor was coming up with sometimes outlandish theories and putting the wrong person in custody. But Honor doesn't have the benefit of knowing she's in a video game, so you just kind of have to go along for the ride. The character design is the biggest reason for the mysteries feeling flat. They're charming but they're also often too on the nose: if they look like a criminal, they're a criminal. I mean, the loan shark literally looks like a shark. Still, if you enjoy Picross and would enjoy reading a story with Ace Attorney Lite style mysteries, it's worth getting on sale at the very least.

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Last Updates

Steam data	11 April 2025 11:17
SteamSpy data	09 April 2025 18:11
Steam price	13 April 2025 20:26
Steam reviews	13 April 2025 05:48

If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Murder by Numbers, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.

SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Murder by Numbers
SteamCharts - Analysis of Murder by Numbers concurrent players on Steam
ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Murder by Numbers compatibility