The House in Fata Morgana dev announces new murder mystery project M

Stage and solve the mystery

Novect has garnered a following over the years, thanks to the word-of-mouth campaign around its excellent visual novel The House in Fata Morgana. Today, Novect announced its next game, project “M”; a murder mystery where the player is both killer and detective.

Project “M” will follow a serial murder case through two different lenses. The detective side pursues the truth in an adventure game setup, moving around areas and asking questions of different characters. But in the murder section, the player actually takes on the role of killer and stages various “perfect crimes,” like setting up a locked room murder.

The protagonist, working for a corpse disposal company, ends up exploring various parts of downtown Tokyo like Asakusa and Yoshiwara. It’s going to be a fairly dark story, it seems.

In an interview with The Mako Reactor, Novect’s Hanada Keika says the team would like to simultaneously launch in English and Japanese. But he also emphasizes that a publisher will be necessary to help cover that.

Making a killing

There are a few games that have explored playing as both detective and killer. Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy‘s opening scene has the player rushing to leave as little evidence as possible, then analyze it and chase their own trail.

It’s a novel idea, coming from a very interesting studio. The House in Fata Morgana has quickly become a very well-known visual novel, thanks in part to both word of mouth and a Switch port making it pretty accessible. It’s a time-bending, perspective-altering thriller that really tugs at the heartstrings. All the more reason to think Novect could absolutely write a good murder mystery.

With Novect and a good portion of the team behind Fata Morgana on this, I’m interested to see what Project M becomes once it gains an official name, release date, and more.