Until Proven Guilty: The Starry Sky Necklace

• Designer: Enrico Procacci
• Publisher: dv Games
• Players: 1+
• Age: 14+
• Time: 90 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Until Proven Guilty is a narrative co-operative game inspired by court-themed visual novels, television series, and video games. In the game, you take on the role of Peter, a brilliant lawyer who’s still a rookie, yet now involved in complicated criminal trials. Can you help Peter defend his client? Each turn, read the trial card and choose an evidence card to refute it. Enter the evidence number into the web app and read the result: if it’s correct, some jurors will side with you, and you can continue in the trial; if it’s wrong, some jurors may side with your opponent, and you will have to try again. Depending on the evidence you choose, you may even receive personalized answers!

To set up the game, first pull out the Jury box and slot in the 12 jurors – half on the Guilty side and half on the innocent side.  Unwrap the Trial deck – but do not shuffle or look at the cards yet!  Finally get out the five envelopes and have them handy so you can open them when instructed.  Download the app for the game to your smartphone and choose the card.

The flow of the game is pretty simple.  You will read the current trial card from the deck (matching the current state shown on the app).  After carefully considering the information on the card – and paying double attention to anything that is conveniently highlighted for you – you must choose one of the available Evidence cards that would provide the best argument against the point made on the card.  Plug this number into the app.  

If you made a good choice, you’ll get rewarded with more story and you might even turn a jury member or two to your side.  After your correct choice is logged, you can flip the card over to continue reading the story.  If you made a bad choice, the app will tell you why your choice wasn’t the best one and sadly you might lose a juror or two.  You will then have to choose again from the remaining cards.  Once you are through the trial card, you may be asked to discard some of the Evidence cards.  Anything that remains in play is available to be used on a later turn though!

Throughout the course of the game, you will be asked to open the five Envelopes to get more information and more Evidence cards – this helps replenish the pool of things to choose from.  Continue through the entire Trial deck – and at the end, the number of jurors on the Innocent side provides your level of success!

My thoughts on the game

So, going back to my younger days, I remember playing a game on my Nintendo DS called Phoenix Wright.  It was similar in theme – you played the role of a rookie trial lawyer… Just look at the art from that game – surely this served as inspiration for this analog release!  (And of course the unforettable scowling pointing finger!)

Anyways, I loved going through the cases, trying to figure out what the important points of the arguments were.  It’s no different in Until Proven Guilty – you will be presented with an argument, and your job is to pick out which of the pieces of Evidence will best support your client’s innocence.

The web app is well done and helps keep you on track.  The story is not as straightforward as I had expected, and I was pleasantly surprised at the depth here as well as a few startling turns of events along the way.

I felt like the overall difficulty level here was low to medium, but that also may be a factor of this being the first release in what looks to be a series.  As with all things, you can’t make the initial release too difficult or it will keep people away from playing later releases.   It was a pleasant experience – I played solo – really like an interactive novel.  Yes, I still had to make the important decisions; the game most definitely does not play itself.   

As with most games in this genre, you can probably only play it once – because once you know the story, you’re likely not going to forget it (especially the interesting twists!).  Nothing is consumed or destroyed during play, so you can easily reset the game and allow someone else to enjoy it after you.

Until Proven Guilty: The Starry Sky Necklace was a nice way to spend an evening at home, and it definitely rekindled my nostalgic memories of a favorite video game series in the past.  If you ever liked those sorts of games, this would definitely be worth a try.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor

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