"Spring Lost Hundred Years Copy" Nomad Trial Play Mystery

100 Years of Spring Is a text adventure game developed by Square Enix. The game presents the suspenseful case of the "Neo-Benguet" in the form of live-action video footage, in which the player plays a novelist, investigates a series of past killings, and relies on reasoning to solve the mysteries of the case.

This demo version only contains the content of the prologue to the first chapter, with a total duration of about 2 hours, and the gameplay and backstory of the game have been preliminarily revealed.

Reasoning should be after watching the play

The first impression of "A Hundred Years of Spring Death" is very "Japanese dramatization". As a live-action game, the plot of this work does not use the "PPT" static image, but all adopts the "broadcast" method to present. The narrative style in the film is very slow, and the words and deeds of the actors are slow and reasonable.

The set is full of "Japanese wind"

However, compared with games such as "Invisible Guardian" and "428: Blocked Shibuya" starring as live-action, this game does not pay as much attention to "choice orientation" as they do, but pays more attention to collecting clues and reasoning. In the demo version, the game offers almost no branch plot, and the case ending is already predetermined, giving the impression of playing Reverse Judgment or Trick X Logic.

On the way to investigate the murder, the player will enter one case chapter after another, and each case is divided into three parts: "Question Chapter", "Reasoning Article" and "Answer Chapter".

The "problem section" is the broadcast part that explains the ins and outs of the case. Like a classic mystery drama, the game will be involved in a sudden event from the perspective of the protagonist, and show all the relevant people in turn along the way.

Probably due to the slower pace of this work, when I watch the problem section, it is easy to feel sleepy because of the flat and direct story with longer content. Although the game has been as concise as possible in the arrangement of the plot, leaving only the part with important clues, the "problem section" still lacks some storytelling skills, and there are almost no ups and downs in the middle of the game that can mobilize the player's emotions, making the entire "problem section" seem more serious and depressed.

In order to enhance the player's sense of participation when watching the show, the game also added some options to enhance the sense of interaction, or to record important clues by pressing keys. But both are of limited use: whichever option you choose, it doesn't have an impact on the direction of the story; even if you don't record clues, they automatically appear in subsequent "reasoning chapters."

When the broadcast of the "problem section" is over, the game also enters the "reasoning section" that is the core of the game. At this point, the player will leave the story and come to the protagonist's "brain reasoning space" to help her clarify her thinking.

In this embodied "temple of thinking", there is a "logical pathway", and what is embedded in the road surface is a number of "doubts" in the case. Players need to stitch together the correct clues to create new "hypotheses" that lead to the next doubt. After repeating this several times, the player can conceive of a complete chain of evidence to reach the end of the "logical path" and complete the reasoning process.

The "hypothesis" obtained on the way will become the player's "evidence" in the subsequent "answer part" to testify on specific puzzles. However, to provide some misleading information to the player, these "assumptions" are both correct and wrong. Some of the assumptions that are so wrong that they make people feel ridiculous at first glance, such as "mummies wander around in order to make others eat their own flesh raw and become immortal." Therefore, collecting false "hypotheses" has also become a different kind of fun in the game.

Some false assumptions are even enough to string together a path to false truth, so the player does not need to draw the right conclusions to end the "reasoning chapter". However, this may also lead to errors in the subsequent "Answers" that the game will be forced back into the "Temple of Thought" to re-examine whether there are still unfinished assumptions.

The "Answers" are live-action reasoning shows that belong to the protagonist, and players need to refine key parts of the reasoning process, such as choosing the murderer or proposing "hypotheses". Just like the courtroom link of "Reverse Judgment", the players in the "Answer Chapter" often find many details that they have ignored before under the reasoning and guidance of the protagonist, and have a new understanding of the evidence, and then discover subversive facts. This sudden feeling is also the most fun part of the reasoning game.

In addition, the "Answer Section" also designed a scoring system, if the player makes a mistake in the reasoning session, the score and rating at the end of the chapter will also be reduced. Since only the first chapter of the trial is available, we have no way of knowing whether subsequent chapters will have the lowest scoring threshold to enter, nor is it possible to determine whether the scoring system has any other effect. As far as the content of the demo version is concerned, the main significance of this scoring system is to provide due rewards for the player's careful thinking.

A mystery spanning a century

The protagonist, a suspense novelist, is commissioned to investigate the remains of white bones accidentally found in an acquaintance's home. However, this white bone also involves four murders in the family spanning a hundred years, which is also the origin of the title of this work, "One Hundred Years of Copying".

Judging from the content of the demo version, it seems that the commonality of these four murders seems to be that they are all related to the "Immortal Fruit" (translated as "Non-Seasonal Fruit" in the game) passed down from generation to generation in the family. For example, the first case revolved around the auction of "immortal fruit".

Since it has been a hundred years since the case occurred, the protagonist can only understand the case by reading the materials. In the process of watching the data, the protagonist will "brain up" the situation at the time of the case, and use himself and the people around him to replace the roles in the case.

As a result, players can see familiar faces in the film of each case. For example, the protagonist, a 28-year-old young woman in reality, plays a 17-year-old girl in the case of the first chapter – although the actor does not look like a 17-year-old at all.

I think that in addition to saving actors and facilitating players to remember human faces, this kind of setting may have a deeper connection with the plot, after all, the core theme of this work is "immortality is not fruitful" and "eternal", so in reality, has someone already mastered the secret of immortality, and has been mixed in several cases in the past? Probably only in the official version will we be able to find the answer to this question.

Compared with the official preview of the 15-20 hours of the game's total flow, the content of the demo version of about 2 hours long only shows the tip of the iceberg of the whole story, making it difficult to make too many conclusions about the overall quality of the plot.

However, I've also noticed that some content localization is slightly flawed. For example, a clue in the prologue that relies on the Japanese context is that because a mother refers to her son by "he" would seem distant, concluding that the son may not have been born to the mother. The word "he" here can be fully translated into words that are more distant in Chinese contexts, thus helping the player to understand when using reasoning systems. For example, "Reverse Judgment 2" has a similar precedent: "Makoto Suzuki" has been Sinicized as "Makoto Zero" due to the particularity of Japanese puzzles, so as to facilitate the player's understanding when solving the puzzle.

epilogue

Although the demo version has very limited content, "Spring Lost Centenary" still presents a unique experience unlike most live-action video games. The clear three-paragraph structure of "question, reasoning, and solution" makes this game a pure reasoning AVG game. The "reasoning space in the brain" of the "reasoning chapter" is novel in form, and there are many pleasures of thinking and trial and error. The plot involves four murders spanning a hundred years, which is enough to make players look forward to the official version of the story.