Happy Valentine's Day! While I'm still calibrating all my graphs and such, I thought I'd take the time to revisit another game I remembered enjoying immensely. At time of writing, Suhoshin is the only game by French studio No More 500. The game originally released in 2022 and features a murder mystery set against a medieval Korean backdrop. The branching-paths visual novel format leads up to just a handful of endings and takes about 10-15 hours depending on your reading speed. You'll probably whip through it faster than I did, since you won't be pausing to take notes and be insufferably scholastic about the whole thing.

As the game warns you in the tutorial, this game is a murder mystery that depends on its twists to tell a compelling narrative. The short answer of whether I think this game is worth playing is "yes," if that's what you came here for. If you just want to see some star points before deciding whether to pick it up, you can use the handy table of contents below to skip there with minimal spoiler risk.

If you're still here, consider yourself warned about potentially spoiling yourself and read on if you dare.

Content warnings

Narrative hardware

Setting nuts and bolts

The game is set in Yangdong, a small village situated a good distance away from Hanyang (present day Seoul). It is the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1292 until just shy of the 1900s, and the game's Steam page adds the "medieval" modifier to set clearer expectations. You won't see guns, or really any technology more advanced than horseback transport and torchlight. The nearest large town is a few days' ride away, making reinforcements not only hard to come by, but slow to arrive.

In other words, we have the world's most perfect murder mystery setup here: a captive audience/investigators/group of potential victims, no way to call for immediate help like an ambulance, and only so much in the way of serious weaponry to fight off a potential attacker. It's a small and peaceful town, after all, so why would your average townie carry anything for self-defense? They're busy tending crops, weaving fabric, and running their market stalls.

The first ten: Setup

At first glance, Suhoshin hews closely to what you'd expect of a by-the-book visual novel. There are choices to be made that turn it into a branching-path visual novel, but the game will only ever tell you one story: that of protagonist Yuri, who is returning home after three years away. He's returning in triumph after passing the gwageo (civil service examinations) to start his new job as an officer in his hometown. Things are looking great, so you know it's gotta be downhill from here.

After he stops to have a bite to eat before his last night under the stars, Yuri meets a mysterious lady he's never seen before. She tells him her horse threw her and ran off, and she's been wandering lost ever since. Yuri is considerate and gallant enough to offer her his blanket and a spot by his campfire, for lack of anything else to give her. In return, she gives him a beautiful jade norigae (a traditional accessory worn for good luck, a long life, etc.). Score!

But in the morning, the woman is gone without a trace. Did Yuri imagine her? Was it a dream? No matter, there's a home to return to and childhood friends to catch up with. Onward Yuri rides toward his destination: his childhood home, the little village of Yangdong.

The first hour: On-ramping

The game gives the illusion of loosening the reins a bit here by giving you power over who Yuri visits first. Yuri's childhood friend Soo Ah has been caring for his house in addition to her crop field, and is overjoyed to see Yuri home again at last. Charismatic officer Yun Bok is also excited that Yuri has not only come home, but is going to be working with him now that Yuri has passed the gwaegeo. Upper-class benefactor Mr. Kim immediately presents as a reasonable authority figure who looked past Yuri's humble beginnings as an orphan to nurture his potential. There's no wrong order here, as all three visits are required and don't change depending on your choices.

Mr. Kim frequently comes as a combo order with resident satto (a supervisory official sent by the king) Mr. Lee, whose staunch adherence to rules of etiquette and class stand to pose more of an obstacle. Yuri will frequently report to one or both of these men as his superiors in the investigation, even though he's the one carrying out all the work.

But that's a problem for Later Yuri. Right now, Yuri gets the day off to rest up after his long journey, with the understanding that the real work will begin with shadowing Yun Bok and learning how to work the beat in Yangdong. After all, this isn't a big city. Things are different here. Quiet. Peaceful. All that training will be handy, but not as deeply necessary. Right?

Wrong. The Steam page told you you were buying a murder mystery, so you've been waiting for the other shoe to drop this whole time, right? And sure enough, it comes in the morning: A woman is found dead in her home.

Outside of the character relationships and a cursory understanding of the area, there's really not much to on-ramp. The setting is largely historical, and a murder investigation can translate to almost any setting without adding much more worldbuilding work. Suhoshin wastes no time in propelling Yuri headfirst into a murder investigation, relegating the vast majority of on-ramping to the day of his return home. No, the real drive of this game is in the tangle of investigation, supporting a handful of branching paths and endings with a story that can skew tense, but never confusing.

Gameplay

Controls, saving, story flow

Suhoshin is a relatively controls-light game. You're advancing text and making choices, none of which are timed. You can adjust the speed of the text if you like, and you can even turn on an auto-forward mode that automatically advances to the next line after a brief pause period.

That said, some stretches can get a little tedious in terms of button-mashing. There's no true "hold to skip" or "skip read" quality-of-life mechanics. Once you reach that point that comes in every branching-path visual novel when you're revisiting old scenes to take paths you have yet to tread, you'll be skipping through at least a few conversations you won't feel the need to fully reread. Given the game's relatively short runtime, I find this annoying but understandable and not a significant obstacle.

UI and screens

Instead of fully rendering gruesome murder and gore, Suhoshin opts instead to show a gore discretion shot: a nondescript hand lying across a bloodied floor. Nothing more. Yuri conveys information about the state of the body, wounds, the surrounding area, etc. via monologue. It's definitely not a 1:1 experience to a more direct examination of a sprite or a scene, but it's enough for the purposes of investigation. Yuri's observation skills will never give you less than you need.

In terms of investigation, Yuri is very much the one driving the ship, not you. You don't get to choose where to move, and often you won't be in charge of what questions to ask in an interrogation, either. This game leans heavy on the "novel" side of "visual novel," which I think was the right move for this specific game. The overall narrative experience never strays too far from the investigation, making the reading experience feel quite focused and tight. It's made clear early on that Yuri knows what to do in crisis situations, even if following his training doesn't provide a quick or easy solution to this particular problem.

Flowchart, choice points

Suhoshin is built on the reliable visual novel staple of the story chart, herein called the "flowchart." I'm a huge fan of the story chart as a concept, since it takes the burden off the player of remembering where choice points are and which ones have yet to be explored. The chart uses small icons to great effect on each labeled section of the chart to indicate choices that are hidden, locked, or available to the player, making navigation easy.

Another tried and true visual novel trick: making your very first choice a case of railroading. On a fresh save, your only option is to take the norigae from the mysterious lady... but you can see that another option might become available, if you can only figure out how to unlock it. How? Why? And how far down this particular branch of story do you have to go before you find out? Turns out, the answer is kinda far.

Maybe this is genre savviness, or maybe it's just metagaming in action, but I tend to think of these choices as railroading me into making a bad decision. And I truly don't mean this as a bad thing! This good-end-guardrailing makes sense from a design standpoint: you don't want the player to see all the best outcomes without working for it, or only provide the tricky puzzles as postgame content, right? Seeing locked choices early in a game like this tends to open up an anticipatory pit in my stomach. I start to look out for pitfalls to avoid as the story progresses, which amps the tension and makes for a more engaged reader. If you're here, you're here for a story. I don't know anyone who comes to visual novels for the thrill of "winning" at them.

The beautiful thing about Suhoshin, though, is that this isn't really a game of trying to make the right choices. It's about collecting all the information Yuri needs so that he knows what other choices exist. Hard to make that call if you don't know the number, so to speak.

Narrative software

Story: A good old hometown murder mystery

This game strikes me as a piece of historical fiction that is more grounded in cultural memory than historical fact. The setting is lovingly rendered, and even includes an index of highlighted Korean terms for English readers to translate and explain unfamiliar words and concepts. That said, the investigation has a definitive turn that may challenge that notion a bit. More on that later.

I particularly like Yuri as an investigator. He's a capable sleuth in his own right, but also serves as an accessible lens for anyone new to the genre. As he works through the details of a crime, he'll bring in his own knowledge and use it to both confirm and debunk possibilities: a thief would have rummaged through drawers or tossed the room, so a relatively tidy murder scene suggests a different motive. The deceased has no defensive wounds and was attacked from the front, which suggests they knew their attacker. Yuri would make a great Joseon CSI trainer.

In the absence of a notebook or other in-game way for the player to collate and review information, Yuri's internal (and external) monologuing is extremely helpful. Keeping in mind that there are pros and cons to just about any game design choice, I find sometimes that the very categorization of information can sometimes spoil or otherwise tip me off to a twist in the mystery: if the crime requires me to look at a random piece of paper from the trash to solve it, the game has to make sure I have that available. And if I'm a nosy little investigator who thoroughly checks everything that ever crosses my possession, it's possible that I get a step ahead of the protagonist. In Suhoshin, Yuri is the sole arbiter of what information the player receives, sure, but we're figuring out what it all means together.

Yuri debriefing what he's found so far to Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee also serves as a good recap for the player. Knowing what worries Yuri helps the player focus in the same direction, which does wonders for keeping the player and Yuri on the same page. I really like how these short recaps pull double duty as player guidance and story progression: Yuri's superiors will frequently throw a new possibility into the mix (or remind him of an old one), present a new obstacle, etc., keeping the game's story moving.

As the investigation gets hairier, these debriefs gradually give way to other types of scenes. Soo Ah frequently serves as a sounding board for Yuri's theories, and Yuri isn't afraid to just monologue it out, either. One way or another, Yuri will find a way to muse about the state of play and consider his next move.

Character

To my eye, Yuri is an excellent choice of protagonist. He's a compassionate investigator who never loses sight of the human cost of murder and crime. In questioning witnesses, he's gentle and quick to reassure. But all this doesn't mean he's easy to fool: his analytical approach to investigations confirms that he wasn't kidding about having a knack for this sort of thing.

Anyone used to betting on whether a character did it/is a villain based on their sprite alone might throw some suspicion Mr. Lee's way. He's got kind of a mean look to him, he's frequently rude and classist, and is likely to rub a lot of players the wrong way. If he can't poke a hole in Yuri's logic, he's not afraid to pull rank and remind Yuri about his lower social standing. To balance him out, Mr. Kim comes across as a refreshingly rational leader who trusts Yuri and is more than willing to be flexible with him during the investigation. When Mr. Lee becomes more of an overt obstacle late in the game, Mr. Kim proves himself more willing to listen to reason and follow the logic than hew to lines of class or etiquette.

Soo Ah, one of Yuri's most constant companions throughout the game, is a cheery character standout with no shortage of troubles of her own. She's a lower class single woman in Joseon-era Korea. She's also an orphan with no family to rely on. Outside of her bond with Yuri and Yun Bok, as well as the offscreen orphans who remain at the unseen orphanage, she doesn't have a support network to fall back to in times of crisis. In light of the murderer hiding somewhere among them, Yuri bucks convention to keep Soo Ah with him instead of telling her to just lock her door and hole up at home. The two of them then have ample time to bond and let Yuri bounce ideas and theories off Soo Ah. The relationship is treated well, especially given my general understanding of Joseon-era gender ideals. While some player-controlled choices have the option to talk down to Soo Ah, Yuri in general is considerate of Soo Ah's feelings and stress as the investigation goes on.

Vibe, sound design

While I would say Suhoshin gets spooky at times, and with the understanding that this is a game that prominently features murder, I don't consider this a horror game. Yuri is appropriately horrified by the crimes, but the focus on the corpses is always investigative and focused on collecting evidence. Rare is the line that revels in the bloodiness of it all, partly because Yuri's own focus is so laser-locked on finding the truth.

Where I think Suhoshin especially shines is in its tension. Anyone familiar with murder mystery conventions will go through significant swathes of this game with hackles raised as you key into an offhand remark about someone being late, someone who went off on their own, someone we'll have to talk to tomorrow. Yuri, however, isn't genre savvy in the slightest: he's a smart investigator, but trusting. Even as someone who's investigated crimes before, Yuri is slow to believe that someone in his village, someone he knows, is capable of something as gruesome as this.

I'll also throw a special mention to the soundtrack. It's beautiful and understated, never too distracting (at least, for me) but always there to help set the mood and bolster tone. The thoughtful solo piano pieces in quiet moments, plus the tension-amping percussion and synth of the sneakier investigation moments all come together for an excellent soundscape. The tense strings in the worst parts of the investigation provide a sharp contrast to the calmer moments and bring these moments into true thriller territory as Yuri walks down the hall, turns the corner, slowly pushes open a door...

Pacing: Fabula

Tip: What's fabula? What's syuzhet? Learn about this and other narratology terms on my Narratology page.

Anyone who's played an investigation/mystery game is likely to recognize the familiar beats of this game. Doubly so for any fellow Ace Attorney-ologists in the crowd: right at the start of Day 2, someone is murdered and someone close to the protagonist is on the hook for it. You're confident it's a case of wrong-place-wrong-time, a nasty coincidence, but it's not looking good.

The game is organized into blocks of time on the flowchart. Instead of organizing more discrete stories into "cases" or similar, Suhoshin tells a narrative that spans across several days and plenty of developments, making individual cases harder to delineate. But the story is experienced roughly chronologically: you read forward from Yuri's return until you hit a choice point that can fork off into branches. From there, you're free to explore the fractal results of your choices one at a time.

This being a mystery, the chronological unfolding of questions and answers lends itself well to the VN format. Suhoshin's rapid escalation of stakes as the problems keep coming both pulls the narrative forward and keeps Yuri (and the player) from getting complacent. There's only so much time before another complication might rear up and strike.

Pacing: Syuzhet

Seriously heavy spoilers from here on. If you're at all interested in playing Suhoshin for yourself, this is a great time to duck out and give it a run. This post isn't going anywhere.

You've also got a little bit of railing built in: some scenes are themselves locked when you come to them, if you happen not to have found a critical piece of information in another branching path. Among plenty of others, this mechanic always puts me in mind of two particular visual novel titans: Raging Loop (2015, Kemco) and 428 Shibuya Scramble (2008, Chunsoft), both of which also lock scenes you come upon in chronology if you haven't found contextualizing information from another line of story. It's a really tasty bit of syuzhet that seems literally impossible in traditional literature, no matter how multi-perspective it gets.

One of the first major point of syuzhet-enforced flowchart navigation is encountered partway through Day 5, which branches into two separate points depending on a player-controlled decision. The choice that sends you down version 5-2 ends in a lock until you find information from 5-1. Decisions like these structure how players are allowed to experience the game, while still offering the illusion of freedom. You're not forewarned in the UI or by Yuri when you come up on a branching choice--some choices are just flavor, but some can send you careening down a fork in the story chart.

Here's a specific example: Players are offered a choice in 5-1 to either patrol the town or focus on the upper class yangban district. I first chose to patrol the town, thinking that this made more sense than expecting the killer to hit high-profile targets in the yangban districts twice in a row. I felt confident in my logic and sent Yuri down the same line of reasoning. For my brilliant deductive rationale, I was rewarded with a wild goose chase and my first death of the game. Whoops.

From the flowchart, I went back into this choice to patrol the yangban district with an eye toward Yuri's own assessment of the situation: whoever is responsible is clearly not afraid to target the yangban, and they also have reliable enough access to the district that they can enter and exit without anyone noticing. In terms of potential suspects, it sounds like we're looking at either a servant to a yangban family or a yangban themselves. This also makes sense, right?

This was also the wrong move, funnily enough, with devastating consequences for Soo Ah. It also unlocked the precise knowledge I needed to proceed down the other path: the mysterious lady reappears by Soo Ah's body to explain some serious plot elements that Yuri has been misinterpreting. He quickly gathers that she is a suhoshin, a type of protector spirit, which kicks off a brand new approach to the problem.

Structure: Run it back, but smarter this time

So, Yuri has gathered that he's been barking up the wrong tree. What does that mean for gameplay?

At any time, if you so choose, you can simply flowchart out of the doomed world your foolish decisions have created to pick up the investigation, but there's narrative ground to tread after Soo Ah's murder. Namely, a subsequent investigation of another home in the yangban district reveals that Mr. Lee himself has been killed, greatly complicating the situation and leading to another bad ending that ends in Yuri's murder. More crucially, this turn of events allows you, the player, to see Yuri's attacker, which is likely to prompt more questions than anything else (click for a major spoiler image).

In theory, you've now seen a full story from the beginning. A couple of them, in my case: Yuri returns home, gets roped into an increasingly difficult murder investigation, and doesn't survive to solve it, regardless of how it happens. His time in this specific narrative is over, and it sure looks for all the world like there was no way for you to come out ahead and even approach solving the damn thing. But what intrigues me the most is how you as the player literally can't get anywhere until you know more about who kills Yuri. And since having Yuri proceed into a branch that requires him to remember things the player hasn't seen would be somewhat self-defeating narratively, you've got the foundational push-pull of the branching-paths visual novel: Failure is the only option, because learning from our failures is how we grow past the need to make bad decisions. The locked scenes are locked because you need context. And for context, you're gonna have to find a way to die (click for a partially redacted spoiler image).

Yuri's experiences of Soo Ah's murder and his own prior-future death come in handy when you reach a branch that requires him to remember said events, even though they haven't technically happened yet, or at all. It's just one chain in a long series of twists that must be unraveled before you can even approach the truth. I like how the game ramps the tension of Yuri's (and, likely, your own) frustration at how impossible this investigation seems, then reveals precisely why that is. The story doesn't hinge on this single reveal, instead allowing it to open the door to more questions, more frustrations, and more reveals as Yuri gets closer to the truth. The murderer is proving impossible to find because they are operating on entirely different rules of existence. In reasonably believing the murderer to be a normal human, Yuri was never going to find the true culprit.

I think there's something intriguing, too, in how the game keeps the player at arm's length here. This story never acknowledges the player as a separate entity from Yuri, allowing you to experience it a bit like a book. The choice points aren't so much the player exerting some kind of will over Yuri to influence his decisionmaking, but the player serving as something akin to Yuri's memory. You can't guide Yuri to a decision based on information he doesn't have, even if that information was gathered in some sort of alternate timeline that isn't "real" right now.

Jump, jump, jump around

Once you get deeper into the thicket of investigation, you gain another layer of appreciation for Yuri taking the time at the start of most scenes to get his ducks in a row and muse about events as they stand. As your choices pile up and you revisit old branches with the aim of going another way, Yuri's debriefings work as a reminder for the player: this is what you chose, this is what happened as a result, and (sometimes) this is where we're heading next.

There's also a sort of imperviousness inherent to the branching-path visual novel genre. Much like an action protagonist respawning at a checkpoint before a boss, you can rest easy in knowing that it's safe to explore bad decisions and terrible outcomes, even and especially if things go south and your protagonist eats shit as the result of your choices. In many games like this, death is the only way to make progress, and avoiding those pitfalls is counter to the experience of the narrative. Remember, we're not just here to win. We're here for a story, and this story involves block-hopping on the flowchart.

Big spoilers: The heart of the problem and the culprit

This is your last chance to turn back and play the game for yourself. Please do consider it, even if you've been a rebellious naughty and already spoiled yourself on the ending. The journey is worth it.

Once you get past the initial stumbling block of how to help Yuri figure out what he needs to know, you learn about a dangerous new player that no one has considered: a kumiho, a kind of monster that can perfectly imitate humans (as only dogs can sense the difference). A character offers up additional information in the form of two legends: a kumiho who marries a human and goes undetected for a hundred days can become human themself. Or, a kumiho with a grudge can become even worse if it successfully consumes the livers or hearts of a hundred people. Not exactly what Yuri wanted to hear, but undeniably important to know going forward.

For what it's worth, I love the idea of the kumiho as a big bad. It puts me in mind of the classic party game Werewolf, in which the culprit appears normal by day, but wakes up at night to murder their neighbors. There's something incredibly, deeply unsettling about the thought that your neighbors could be preparing to murder you in the same moment that they're with you, worrying about the situation. Yuri's investigation begins to take on some shades of this as well, as he begins to doubt knowledge and information he'd previously taken for granted. The question of who to trust becomes all the more frightening when you take into account that literally any person, even people you've previously spoken to, could be a monster perfectly imitating that person.

Games-over are cheap, but also vital

I'm in love with how tiered the reveals are, especially within Yuri's death scenes. Speaking chronologically, an early scene on Night 3 yields practically no information beyond the fact that Yuri walked into a trap. Chronologically, the next one can be found on the Village route from the Day 5-1 choice, also providing no information about Yuri's killer when he dies besides a creepy laugh. It's not until a later scene on Day 7-1 that we get a look at the thing in question, and even then, it's not so clear what you're seeing until you get further down the 5-2 locked route, which gives you critical information about the kumiho.

It even reaches a point in the Eun Seo choice following 8-2 where Yuri himself starts to understand how he stands to benefit from dying at the hands of the kumiho. He uses this rare opportunity to gain as much information as he can in the hope that he'll be able to use what he learns in other timelines of investigation, which is exactly what we as players need him to do. To the very end, Yuri is not just a capable investigator, but a stalwart lawman putting himself on the line to keep his community safe.

Aboutness

It's class struggle (again)

It's that time again. Let us beg the question: Does ACAB include Yuri?

There's a push and pull in his arc across the story: a poor boy from humble beginnings who has been unexpectedly swept up by an elite benefactor and brought into a police/law enforcement position as a result of this new privilege. He brings his street smarts and knowledge of the community to a job that might otherwise be all about protecting the elites and their property. But simultaneously, he's constrained by the expectations of the job and the incredible debt he now owes the person who made it possible for him in the first place.

In one branch of the story (the "Soo Ah got murdered" branch, to be precise), Yuri's investigation begins to point toward the baekjeong class: "untouchable" people who often work as slaughterers and butchers. Mr. Lee is quick to chime in with how untrustworthy they are and is all too happy to point the finger their way. This ends up not going anywhere for unrelated reasons, but it glances along the question of class. On a similar note, the Lees (both Mr. Lee and his daughter Eun Seo) will also periodically point out that their continued presence in the village is dependent on the perception of Mr. Lee as an effective satto, putting additional pressure on Yuri to prove himself and find the killer. He wouldn't want to make his superiors look bad, right?

Staying beneath notice

It doesn't escape me that the crux of Yuri's investigation is gender-focused. For the era, I figure this would be typical: he finds a ripped-up body murdered with extreme prejudice, and from this cobbles together some basic information he can probably safely assume. He's looking for someone strong, someone not too squeamish, someone handy with a blade, all things more likely to describe Joseon men than women. On top of this, the first several victims of the killer are, themselves, women, bringing in an extra layer of suspicion around this very targeted-feeling violence. Is it prejudicial to make these assumptions, or is it just smart policing?

So, once the reveal about a kumiho possibly imitating people while really being some kind of terrible monster comes up, I think it's an incredibly deft way to redirect the investigation's attention away from this more common tactic of narrowing down people who are capable of committing the crime. Instead, it becomes a game of figuring out who knows more than they should, who's forgotten information they should know, who might be hiding something, who's been behaving oddly--all things that Yuri, as a recent return to Yangdong, may well have forgotten over his three years of absence. This unique set of circumstances all but forces him to trust people at their word, lacking any other way to go about investigating.

In particular, Eun Seo and Mr. Kim's daughter Yuna acting oddly doesn't strike Yuri as odd at all: not only do both these ladies outclass him in terms of social status, he's never even spoken to Yuna at all before the events of the game, so he has no baseline to compare his interactions with her against. The game cleverly wraps some of the mystery's keys into backstory and exposition, perhaps betting on the player writing it off or forgetting about it entirely by the time the big reveals start rolling out. By taking backstory for granted and needing to trust people at their word, the mystery is able to build in two directions at once. But while you and Yuri are focused on finding a killer, the kumiho is bodysurfing in the background, fueling an entirely different story you'll come upon later.

This reveal also casts a new light on the baksu's accusations of Yun Bok and Yuri during the gut ritual. What initially sound like blatantly untrue statements must be reconsidered in light of what we now know: that a monster may have imitated others in order to kill, creating the very real question of how on earth we're going to prove any of that. By flipping the question of how the killer got in and out of the guarded yangban district around, the mystery gradually comes to center around how to catch a monster that can be anyone. Structurally, it's a fun way to mix up the investigation without fully invalidating any of the prior investigating. The foreshadowing is honestly top class, and the overall experience is engaging from start to finish as a result.

Remaining above suspicion

That Eun Seo is the first major kumiho suspect presents several problems. Not only is this person the daughter of the satto, therefore holding a high status that would be social suicide for Yuri to accuse out of pocket, they are also a pretty young woman, which falls in line with what we know mythologically about the kumiho: they like to take on the guise of pretty young women to lure in typically male victims. While not everything is perfectly in line with what you expect, does that mean it isn't true? Not to mention: in that bad ending in 7-1, didn't we see Yuna murdering Yuri, not Eun Seo? Even with Yuri's newly ripple-effect-proof memory, it seems there are still some puzzles the playeris able to consider independently of Yuri, allowing us to survey the situation with an extra degree of distance and clarity.

Then, the fact that Mr. Lee puts up so much resistance to Yuri's rather gentle prying about Eun Seo's previous health scare might signal to players that something's fishy. Does this fact alone position this character as a potential suspect in the greater question of how the kumiho got here, or are they just acting as expected? It's certainly very easy to lob suspicion at this character, especially given your dearth of other viable options.

Theme: The tragedy of loss

Protecting others, vengeance/payback (Yuri for the deaths of loved ones, the kumiho for the same)

The reveal of the kumiho's origins comes in the form of a bit of an exposition dump as Yuri is gritting his teeth through a gruesome death at her hands in order to get information from her. The stories we heard earlier come back with a twist: turns out both of the kumiho stories apply. This kumiho was spurred onto the "eat one hundred hearts" path after her "get married and stay undetected to become human" attempt went up in flames. Without your knowledge, the entire game has actually been the kumiho's runup to a legendary, generations-long takedown of the descendants of the people who ruined her happy, non-murdery life (click for a major, major spoiler image).

To my eye, this presents two problems, where Yuri and the investigation has only been focused on one. As in any good murder mystery, we have to make sure the killer is stopped. That's a given. But now, I'm also wondering about whether there is justice for the kumiho. Could we get the kumiho to change her ways, maybe revert back to the old version of her that loved humans and wanted to become one?. With all this in mind, here's the ultimate, spoilery payoff: It pains me to report that the kumiho receives no justice or redemption. The ending of Yuri's investigation must end with her death.

Is this a miscarriage of justice? Does Yuri have a responsibility to the kumiho, or just to his community? Is there a meaningful way to enact restorative or reparative justice for a kumiho that has been on the path of vengeance for generations? A part of me felt let down that the game opened up all these questions, but didn't seem interested in answering them.

Endings

The only true variable in the endings is whether or not Yuri and Soo Ah end up together. For my money, this is the least interesting part of the story, though no less valuable for its inclusion. To achieve the "good" ending in which Yuri proposes marriage and they ride off into the sunset together with the convoy of friends, your only real objective is to treat Soo Ah nicely. That's it. Every so often, choices in conversation with this character will pop up that amount to a binary between "Say something mean/dismissive/rude" or "Be nice to Soo Ah", which make this ending pretty easy for any player not openly looking for video game cruelty potential. It puts a nice bow on the end of the characters' story without dragging on too long after the murder mystery is resolved.

In both of the full endings, the mystery is solved. If you happen to feel like counting all the soft games-over in which Yuri dies, your real total is six. Special dishonorable mention to the lack of bad ending in Night 1 should Yuri pin the wrong Eun Seo as the kumiho. Let players make bad and wrong decisions!.

This isn't a variable, but I'm going to specifically call out the late-game reveal that Mr. Kim is Yuri's father as a choice I deeply disagree with. I think it changes a lot about how I view the character, especially since it recasts a lot of his trust in Yuri as stemming less from a level-headed stance and more from nepotism. Mr. Kim doesn't trust and believe in Yuri for any merit of Yuri's own, but has been rather openly favoring Yuri on familial grounds. I also felt like there was missed narrative in the kumiho's anti-Kim-family quest not addressing Yuri's relation to them, perhaps suggesting that she doesn't know as much as implied. It felt odd to me that there was such a big deal made about this reveal, especially since it came after a point when it could have made any plot-relevant difference, which I felt limited its impact.

And before I forget: Yes, ACAB does include Yuri, literally.

Game taxonomy breakdowns

Star Points

Narrative: 8/10. Suhoshin is a very tightly told story whose focus never wavers from finding the truth. The Joseon setting adds a historical fiction flair to the tale and is likely a novel experience for other American players not as familiar with the Joseon culture and history. I found the characters realistically portrayed and easy to empathize with, even if I didn't like them as people.

Gameplay: 5/10. There isn't much in the way of true gameplay to love, but I thought the flowchart was well-implemented and served its purpose in facilitating player movement through the branching paths. I never felt lost or confused about where to go next.

Innovation: 2/10. Suhoshin is taking very clear inspiration from the likes of Raging Loop and others to tell a smaller-scale story to great effect. Personally, I don't mind that the game doesn't have easter eggs or other little secrets. Suhoshin knows the story it wants to tell, and isn't going to kill time on anything besides that. And that's valid and good!

Style: 7/10. The visual style is fine for what we're here to read. The art team is clearly proficient, but I did find myself wishing for a little more variety in sprite expression and movement. All the characters are very distinct and easy to tell apart, but there isn't much in the way of dynamic action onscreen. Maybe a side effect of the relatively straitlaced historical setting, but there you have it.

Satisfaction: 8/10. I enjoyed my time with Suhoshin, full stop. The very tail end discussion about the kumiho's tragic origins, as well as Yuri's parentage did make me wish for a little bit more closeout on the subjects, though. Felt like a bit too much skipped narrative real estate for me, but that's maybe a minor quibble.

Tetris-Higurashi Rating Scale

I give this game a +8. Suhoshin relies first and foremost on its narrative to carry the gameplay experience, allowing the player to flex some independence only after reading the appropriate plot developments and twists. While you aren't free to influence Yuri's decision-making in every direction, the guard rails on the choice point unlocks are easy to follow and make for a fun reading experience.

Flinn's faves: Rapid-fire roundup

Favorite character: It's easy to love the dynamic duo of Yuri and Soo Ah, but honestly, I'm really fond of Mr. Lee. At the end of the day, he's just a guy trying his best at a job he isn't very good at. Your call as to whether this refers to being a satto or being a father. Possibly both. Let me know what you think.

Favorite location: The forest during the day. I really like the background art. I like trees, what can I say?

Favorite sound effect: The frankly goblin-esque laughter of the murder after killing Yuri over Soo Ah's body in the 5-1/Village bad ending. I think it's better than the non-altered evil laugh, and certainly funnier.

Favorite moment: The heart-dropping second when I realized Yuri was absolutely going to get got by the kumiho impersonating Soo Ah (click for a major spoiler image). It's so understandably genre-blind and played to great effect.

Favorite song: "The Quiet Morning" is one of those quiet piano pieces I love so much on games like this. It's warm and intimate. Makes me feel like waking up all cozy on a rainy morning.

Flinn played Suhoshin on PC via Steam. The game is also available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 and 5.

Suhoshin on Steam

Suhoshin is a 2D Visual Novel set in the medieval Joseon period of Korea. While investigating a series of mysterious murders, you will have to make choices that will lead you down different paths toward different endings.

STEAM