Note: A copy of Type-NOISE Shonen Shojo was provided by the publisher of this game for this review.
Logic puzzles and mysteries have long been a favorite pastime of mine. Whether it be crosswords, logic puzzle activity books, or video games like the Zero Escape or Professor Layton series, I just absolutely love puzzles. I love them even more if they’re wrapped in a fun or compelling mystery, something that makes solving the puzzles feel rewarding aside from the simple act of doing it and knowing that you solved it. I’m also a fan of visual novels, having spent my time in and out of the industry by playing, writing, editing, and testing them, so the combination of visual novel and puzzle game, like the aforementioned Zero Escape series, were games that have always stayed very, very close to my heart as some of my favorites of all time. This very year, my likely personal game of the year contender is Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka’s Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, so when I was offered a review copy of Type-NOISE Shonen Shojo, I barely even blinked before saying yes. Puzzle novels, which combine visual novels and puzzle solving, aren’t as common as it might seem, and so I was excited to get a chance to try one I hadn’t heard of, and hoped that I’d be in for something interesting rather than bland.
My instinct was right on the money, and what I found was a charming puzzle novel game that doesn’t exactly push the envelope in most ways, but instead offers a fun, competent, and breezy puzzle novel experience. If you’ve never played a game like this before, Type-NOISE makes for a fairly accessible starting point, mostly due to the way in which it plays on genre conventions and shows that the developers had a fairly solid idea of what they were doing and where they came from. As a note, I kept my screenshots from the first two hours or so of the game, and have worked to limit spoilers to any of the game’s deeper mysteries or secrets, so feel free to read on without worrying about the story being ruined!
Noise, Noise, Noise
Type-NOISE begins with two characters finding themselves locked inside of a room that is slowly filling with water, providing you with a general tutorial of how the game will play out and what to expect from how it works: Players can manipulate a 2D screen to interact with the background like a point and click adventure, and as they do so find items and clues that will be used to solve the overall puzzle of the room and grant them the ability to exit it. Items can be combined, and often the main goal of finding items is to combine them into something else, which can then be used to interact with the map to progress the puzzle. As you collect items and hints, players will be given “Noise” fragments, which when combined in a small little puzzle mini-game, show the player memories the characters have forgotten.
This is generally the gameplay loop for the overall game: Progress the story, enter a new puzzle room, discover the secrets of the character(s) that room pertains to, and overall try to uncover the overarching puzzle that surrounds everything going on around the characters and how they arrived in this version of Shibuya. Because an escape room game isn’t complete without some sort of larger mystery, the characters learn that they are stuck in this version of Shibuya that seems to mimic the real world, and that attempting to leave before solving their puzzles will result in their deaths.
As you play through the various rooms for each character, the game uses a flowchart system that allows you to track your progress through the story, but also allows you to easily go back to sections that you didn’t complete and see what options can be taken. For example, one of the early choices in the game asks you which of two rooms you would like to go into, and depending on which you choose, the story diverts. I like the simplicity of the flowchart and the fact that jumping back to sections is always available; one of the least favorite parts of games like this is the fact that you sometimes have to replay the entire game just to see how a new choice affects the overall narrative; here, you can simply jump back and see it immediately, and you can also jump to various parts of the timeline whenever you want.
Puzzling for Fun and Profit
The biggest way these games sink or swim tends to rely on the puzzles, and how difficult they are to complete, measured against how hard it can be to discern their solution without help (or penalty). I found that the puzzles in the game were generally accessible and thematic, but never seemed to dip into being exceptionally difficult or tricky. I will say that at times the game gets in your way of figuring things out simply by telling you via a hint in the top left what you ‘should’ be doing, but I also realized that I started to piece together the puzzles fairly quickly after a bit and never found myself getting stuck, either.
Considering how many types of games like this that I’ve played, I have to admit some familiarity with the flow of a game like Type-NOISE and that such genre familiarity helped me speed along through the game. If you’re not overly familiar with puzzle room / death game style visual novels, there are certainly a few spots that may give you some trouble, but nothing that should require having to look outside of the game in order to solve, which I appreciated. Not every single puzzle game has to be a brain melter that stresses out the player, and I found the balance of the puzzles in the game enjoyable.
The game is also quite nice to look at, even with the simple 2D sprites of characters and the rendered backgrounds; the backgrounds themselves all have a nice style to them that helps them seem just slightly weirder than reality, and they also have visual touches that make it easier to spot interactable items and points of interest by drawing your eye to them; there is also a feature that helpfully highlights any remaining things you haven’t interacted with yet in the room. The characters are all colorful and visually distinct, and I appreciated the way the developers found to work in occasional 2D animation into the otherwise static sprites and dialogue boxes. This carries over to the puzzles, too, which all have distinct looks and themes to them, rather than feeling like you’re just solving math homework.
Have We Been Here Before?
Perhaps one of the weaker aspects of the game is the narrative; again, if you’re familiar with puzzle novel games, there are many ways in which playing Type-NOISE will likely rekindle feelings towards those games. The characters are likeable but also very archetypical, which at least helps in giving the player some sense of what to expect from them. I also was happy to find that none of the characters tended to dip into particularly annoying or frustrating archetypes at that, with the cast being fairly tight and controlled. Games like Dangan Ronpa or Zero Escape often have large, idiosyncratic characters who rely on gimmicks to help make them memorable against the backdrop of the large (and often slowly depleting) cast.
Type-NOISE sticks the landing by relying on six characters throughout the story, which helps make them stay present and relatable to the player. In a lot of cases, this helped me enjoy the game by realizing I didn’t have to memorize a huge cast, but also found their narratives easier to relate to as they’re grounded in things like regret, loss, inadequacy, and more. The “Noise” each character experiences and exists as a mechanic deals with their forgotten memories, most of which are primarily based around various traumas in their lives before the game began. There are also multiple endings, which again makes the use of the narrative system and navigating the flowchart absolutely a lifesaver for, and a feature I actually wish other games had (I’ll even admit that one of my struggles with Hundred Line is that even though you can ‘skip’ things you have done before, there is so much to do that it still takes a very long time to get to ‘new’ things). I enjoyed the game fully and also didn’t mind the setup of the game and the tropes it played with, instead finding that the developers seem to understand what makes these games entertaining and worked to tell their own story within the boundaries of puzzle novel games.
There are also a lot of ways in which the developers of Type-NOISE show their familiarity with the genre of puzzle novels and also of games in general; one of the early chapters has you dealing with video games as a story beat, and features references to games like Street Fighter and Dead By Daylight (which got a laugh out of me with the title END BY MIDNIGHT), and that carries through to most of the other character stories that touch on familiar areas and experiences. The knowledge of media genres made Type-NOISE far more interesting to me than I first expected, because instead of feeling generic, it helped draw me in by showing me the more clever ways the developers wanted to attract my attention and show off their unique take on puzzle room games.
Rough Edges
There are a few things I need to bring to attention however before wrapping up my review and recommendation of the game, and the chief complaint I have with Type-NOISE is the proofreading in the game. I can tell by the credits that this was a small team and so I do not want this to sound nitpicky, but there are numerous times in which the script of the game has typos and grammatical mistakes that distract from the writing, sometimes to comical effect. One such scene early in the game has a character trying to grapple with the memory of a lost sibling, and the statement should read “You gaze at your brother’s lifeless body”, but the typo instead makes it read “You baze at your brother’s lifeless body”, which completely sucked me out of the game’s story and made me laugh at an inopportune time.
To peel the curtain a bit, a long time ago in a lifetime before this one, I worked Q&A on games just like this one. The job of being an editor in this capacity is often hard, time consuming, and a job for just one person. I am happy to look past a few typos here and there, because games that cost millions of dollars more than this and with teams hundreds of times this size make far worse errors than a few typos in a text document and translating it into game files. That said, I also can’t ignore the fact that these typos are pretty consistent throughout the game, and I would be remiss to not mention them to anyone considering picking up the game. Hopefully, the textual errors can be fixed in an update to the game, removing my only real negative interaction with the game itself.
My only other reservation is that the game is not exceptionally difficult, nor does it push the envelope in terms of narrative. I don’t actually think this is a bad thing, and I actually think that it’s fine if media execute what they are trying to do successfully instead of constantly trying to break new ground. Type-NOISE is a great introduction to puzzle novel games like this, but if you go in expecting it to reinvent the genre or produce something that it is not trying to do, you may be disappointed, which is mostly based on expectation over reality.
Novel Entertainment
I love visual novels in all forms: pure text, puzzle games, metatextual narratives, they’re all amazing and they’re all vastly misunderstood by numerous people for whether they are, or are not, games, among other things. If you’ve never had much experience with visual novels, I really liked my time with Type-NOISE: it kept the pace moving, the game did not feel overly long, and the narrative was satisfying and had fun character interactions. Even with the sometimes awkward translation, the game remained fun and I was invested to see how things wrapped up. The puzzles were also never overly complicated or frustrating, which also helps in ways that some other games in this genre sometimes get wrong (I’ll even say that there were a few puzzles in the Zero Escape series that drove me up a wall): simple doesn’t mean bad, and in a lot of cases, the flow of Type-NOISE and how accessible it felt were a very welcome experience.
Good genre fiction is enjoyable because it plays within the conventions of the genre it is in, and Type-NOISE knows what makes a good puzzle novel and works to present the player with an experience that is new, even if it occasionally hits some familiar beats. But that is also a way that good genre fiction excels: it relies on the audience to know what to expect, and then finds ways to introduce new concepts, spins, or other approaches to familiar paths. If you’re considering trying a puzzle novel game, or a fan of the genre, Type-NOISE is an enjoyable and fun experience that I recommend.
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