A fun little two-hour romp. I'm not totally sure I get the "this is the best Sonic thing in decades" comments, but I didn't have many complaints.
It had a good setup and great art. Really wanted a better twist at the end other than + - what seemed like the writer venting about being the instigator of a messy breakup lmao. Even just taking it for what it was it seemed like a weird tone shift rather than plot that was properly built up to. Special stage mechanics weren't awesome and became annoying toward end. I don't know. Calling it a near miss. On one hand it is a free game. On the other hand it is a free game because some random indie decided to make it as a fan work for reasons that I am not aware of and it didn't feel like a proper fool (they didn't commit to the gag nor was the twist really a prank) nor do I feel anything was executed greatly besides the art which was absolutely amazing. The individual characters were written well enough too, I guess.
This was actually really cute - I love the artwork too. I like that if you spam playing the slot machine on the right in the casino carriage, your character develops a gambling addiction and Tails tries to give them an intervention. Ace Attorney trained me to find funny dialogue. The only thing that bothered me is the lack of, or incorrect use of, punctuation throughout the game. Lots of commas where there should be full stops and a lack of commas where there should be - it reminds me of a fan-game in that respect. Visual novels usually have better orthography. But that's a minor nitpick.
I went through this game with my partner, and it's a really cute little game with great artwork. On the basis of this being a legitimate game, I can say Sega definitely hit it way out of the park for April Fools this year. That said, people have been noticing the game checks for bad words when naming the protagonist and makes them refuse it: Quite a good deal of names are forbidden by the game - most of these are the obvious sexual terms, certain parts of the body and blatantly racist/ableist/transphobic slurs, though for obvious reasons the game will also block words like "kill" and "murder". The game is also very thorough with blocking bad words as it also checks for substrings, so "butt" and "butts" will both match. That also means you can't name the protagonist "Phoenix Wright" because the name contains the word "hoe" (the Scunthorpe Problem strikes again). Out of curiosity I even used every bad word from the PS1/Dreamcast Spider-Man game, and all of them were blocked, though "nutsac" was accepted by the game but "nutsack" isn't. The game doesn't just forbid bad words, however... It also prevents you from naming the protagonist after other characters (a lá Undertale), with different flavour text for trying to do so. Unlike the bad word filtering, the game does not check for substrings for these names, so you can still use names like "Sonic Fan". The only character names it checks for are those who are part of the narrative, so using names of characters who don't appear in the game such as "Cream" or "Silver" is fair game. These are the character names you can't use: Spoiler: Character names AMY BLAZE CONDUCTOR CUBOT EGGMAN ESPIO FLICKY KNUCKLES METAL SONIC ORBOT ROUGE SHADOW SONIC TAILS VECTOR Spoiler: Side note regarding the character name list above; contains ending spoilers Curiously, despite Sage making a cameo at the end you can still name the protagonist "Sage", but not "Metal Sonic", who also cameos.
Don’t think I’ve seen this mentioned anywhere yet but I think it’s cute how the story takes place on Amy’s birthday while this year is the 30th anniversary of Sonic CD.
I made it through 28 happy years without knowing this word. I’m longing for those days which now seem long past.
The credits say that the "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" filter is attributed to Shuttershock; this can easily be found on GitHub. Following that bit is the entirety of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which I don't think was necessary. This was fun to play, though the later THINK stages were quite difficult. Maybe it was just my aging PC creating lag, though.
I absolutely loved it all, but there's one part in particular that really got to me. Spoiler: Game Spoilers When you're trying to defuse the Egg Timer, all of the options made me laugh uncontrollably. By the time I got to turn it upside down and kiss it, I was totally hyperventilating. I don't think I have laughed that hard, much less at a Sonic game in a really long time!
This game was cute. I wouldn't mind seeing more THINK levels in some kind of smartphone game or something. I think the fact that this game came from the minds of the social media team and actually released shows how flexible Sega has become, and I really do like it. I'm looking forward to even more fun social media shenanigans in the future
Played though, not bad. Can clearly see BBFA3's influence in it being a VN with minigames (well... a minigame) though, it seems to even be the same engine as BBFA3:TT =P Spoiler Speaking of the minigame, the difficulty curve definitely got steeper towards the end - I did not see the collapsing floor coming at all the first time it happened, that was the first time I failed a stage. After that one I got most of them within a try or two, with one or two exceptions - the scrolling did begin to play with my eyes towards the end though, isometric movement with Sonic for precision platforming was hit and miss in Sonic 3D and it's definitely carried over to TMoStH. I did chuckle at a few moments in the story - Sage and Metal's appearance at the end in the t-shirts for example; and while I did know the twist was coming thanks to people mentioning it, I thought it was going to be that the conductor was Robotnik in disguise after the whole "I've been working for 32 years and am about to retire" line, given 32 years ago was 1991... I also didn't think the murderer would be Espio, I thought it was Knuckles after he mentioned Sonic having been knocked out despite not actually seeing him. I guess Amy must have just told him about it. Overall: 8/10, needed more fishing minigames
I finished it last night. I kind of played it on autopilot so I wasn’t super engaged in trying to figure out the “killer,” but it ended up being who I expected. The red herring being a fake-out was very obvious, but the real culprit was also pretty obvious, so I assumed maybe it was trying to throw us off there. The Think stages were fun! I half expected to get a Think stage version of Blue Spheres mode as a reward for completing the game. I think it would have been a cool bonus. I’m curious what Sonic Team thinks about the game. I will admit that I don’t usually like the series in the hands of non-Japanese storytellers/developers. Between Prime, the films, Frontiers… the stories and presentation just don’t resonate with me the same way. However, this felt pretty inline with how I see the characters and was surprisingly good for an April Fool’s joke, so props to the team! I wonder if they’ll localize it for Japan. I wouldn’t mind seeing more from this team in spin-offs. Edit: I reordered sentences while writing my original post and it ended up sounded more weeby and less complimentary to the devs of this than it should have. I wanted to correct that.
Just finished it! Really fun story, great art, surprisingly good music, and all for such a reasonable price! If they released a VN like this every year, I'd honestly drop a few bucks to play it... but I'm one of those people who buys and reads the IDW comics regularly, so that's no real surprise. I do hope it stays up on Steam and isn't pulled down in a few months because "it's just a gag game". That being said, I do think it's really funny that you pull up the official Sonic the Hedgehog Franchise page on Steam and "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog" is listed alongside Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Frontiers, Sonic Mania, etc. Spoiler: I did figure out who the murderer was fairly early on... ...but kinda for the wrong reasons. The story started with the train malfunctioning, and Espio was reading the train manual, so I figured he learned some vulnerability he could use to disrupt the train so he could distract everyone while he "murdered" Sonic. Tails ID'd that book and noticed it was out of place, but with Espio being a detective himself, I figured he could place it there on-purpose knowing Tails would notice and help solidify his alibi. Once we saw the secret passage to the library, I had no real doubt. The train itself being an antagonist I did NOT see coming, though I knew all those robot hands everywhere had to amount to something by the end. They were everywhere and pretty ominous. I was certainly pleased by the fact that this was a detective story where the characters actually have to find clues and do deductive reasoning... that was an issue I had with the Detective Pikachu movie. I feel like all the big plot beats where just kinda told to Pikachu and the kid by someone else. No real sleuthing.
The good news is silly gag games like this (see also "Streets of Kamurocho") tend to remain installable with the right link even when their proper Steam store page gets taken down. In this case steam://install/2324650 should do the trick.
Seeing as Sega's 2019 April Fool's visual novel Love Thyself - A Horatio Story is still on Steam, I'd expect this to stay up too.
Does anyone have a list of Easter Eggs? For example, Sonics OVA shirt is in the closet of the music car.
