A touch of horror, some subtle romance, and a story that is interpreted rather than explained, Homicipher has rewired my brain on how I see visual novels and storytelling. There’s a lot wrapped up in this game – from mechanics to characters – that you’re bound to find someonething to love if you’re into monster men and okay with just a little murder.

Game Name: Homicipher
Developer: 八名木Games
Publisher: Gamirror Games
Platforms: PC (Steam)
Age Rating: Reviewer suggests M (17+)
Price: $13.99 (Steam)

game trailer

isekai’d and all i got was some murder

I have been dying to write this review since I played Homicipher right after its release in November 2024. Scumberly and I puzzled our way through the game together, and despite finishing it in record time (for me), it has been nearly 10 months before I finally have the ability to sit down and gush about my thoughts.

What took me so long? Well, life has a way of taking one on an adventure they didn’t plan for, which is exactly what happens with our heroine in Homicipher. After finding herself somehow in the monster realm, she learns quickly that the monsters speak their own language, and in an attempt to get home, she must go through several trials and learn how to communicate or her life is forfeit.

In Homicipher, you’re not only making choices that determine which ending you will ultimately obtain, you’re piecing together a language through interactions with monsters – not all friendly. While there is no negative to being wrong on your cipher, deducing that ‘kill’ is ‘help’ might land you in an early bad end.

It’s a game of wits, intuition, and the ability to read people monsters as much as read words.

not for the adrenaline junky

I’ve played many a’ otome, and I have felt my heart racing from romance and action. I’ve gone persisted through jump scares and slow building dread, paranoid of every sound above the thumping in my chest in many a’ horror game. Homicipher, sadly, falls far below anything that gets my heart pumping.

Is it a horror game? Yes, most certainly. While it doesn’t employ big jump scares to keep you on edge, there is a general sense of unease throughout Homicipher, mainly due to being lost in a world we hardly understand. There is gore, violence, stalking, and quick time events that keep you focused and engaged.

Is it a romance game? Ehn, that one is a little more up to interpretation. There is very little focus on creating a bond or relationship with any of the characters, and in some cases the romance just kind of manifests at the end like that was the logical conclusion to a survival story.

What Homicipher brings to the table is a horror story only in costume, and a romance story only in name. At its core, Homicipher is a language cipher game with puzzle aspects, themes of horror, and ambiguously romantic endings.

I enjoyed the game, the mechanics, and the story immensely, but I think that Homicipher attempts to wear too many hats to really excel at any of the categories it covers. This makes it a unique game that I’m sure I won’t find in anything else I play, but it also causes it to fall short of most games that focus on one aspect.

a story that grows with you

Deep and complex world building is a wonderful thing, but often leaves readers slogging through a lore dump that the main character should by all rights know already. At times, it can come across as clunky and unnatural. Normal people don’t start talking about the rules of normal, everyday life like their bestie needs a crash course.

That’s where some of my favorite overused tropes come into play. MC with amnesia. It allows normal people to explain things without coming across as weird and unnatural. Bonus points if we don’t get all this info at once, because normal people don’t often think about what is normal to them until it attention is drawn to it by MC doing something abnormal.

While the heroine of Homicipher doesn’t exactly experience full-blown amnesia, she has no idea how she got where she is, or why she’s there. The beauty of the game being a language deciphering game is that we, the player, are starting off in the exact same place as the MC. We know the rules of the real world, the human world, but not of this monster world where they speak monster speak and have monster customs and monster thoughts.

But we get to learn. And we get to learn right alongside MC. There are some scenes that you can easily skip through or miss that guide you through a sort of tutorial, but so much of the game play of Homicipher is critical thinking and deduction that the game ends up giving you as much or as little as you want/need/choose.

The narrative is sprawling in such a way that you can skip over entire interactions by making certain choices, and speed yourself to an ending– good or bad! If you’re the type to want to explore every detail and aspect of a game, you can do that, too. The choice is yours!

You are rarely forced to participate in an interaction or activity that you didn’t initiate. And there are many options, choices, and activities the game gives you outside of the usual visual novel two-to-three choice response. Don’t forget that you’re also deciphering monster speak, so you’ve got the additional mechanic of your lexicon, which you can update at any time.

Monsters and men

Homicipher doesn’t have clear cut routes for its romance options. You meet a mass of monstrous men throughout the game, and based on choices you make as the protagonist, you end up on one of four routes that cover multiple endings with multiple characters.

In essence, no one character gets their own route, and some characters that do get “happy” endings aren’t romantic. Because of this, I can’t break up the LIs in my usual fashion, so instead I’ll drop a few deets about each of the “main” monsters you spend a significant amount of time with.

multi-ending monsters

As you can see, all of the monstrous men are very humanoid. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t have some really monstrous looking characters, though I suppose with the current climate that could have veered into troublesome territory.

Short and sweet bitter

Unfortunately, Homicipher is a fairly short game as far as visual novels and romance games go. The store page claims it is designed to be replayed once you fill out your lexicon so you can understand the story fully, but even doing that wouldn’t give you many answers that were posed by our heroine. We just simply never learn them.

Having gone through every ending available, it took me less than ten hours to full complete. This counts time I spent talking with Scumberly while we were playing, as I tend to contemplate and theorize a lot during game play. Ten hours is the second shortest visual novel I have played, only beat by Otome Chat Connection – a mobile phone game you can play through in a handful of hours.

I wanted more. I wanted to know more about each love interest and the world and what happened before and after. I wanted to understand our heroine that we get very little information on. I wanted to know her story and her life and how she got where she was.

I wasn’t the only one, either, it seems. Fans were so intrigued and interested in finding out more that the developer made several announcements on her Twitter account begging people to only contact her about bugs in the game. Eventually, she left Twitter and shortened her future work on Homicipher in order to avoid the barrage of questions relating to the game that she was getting after her multiple pleas went ignored.

I was very sad to have learned this, both that fans had harassed her off social media, and also that she needed to distance herself from the game in order to regain peace. I may love my obsessive men in games, but real people deserve real respect and compassion.

Needless to say, no more lore or content was provided after the last updates were published for Homicipher, leaving the fans and the fan community to fill in the blanks with several varying headcanons and theories that the game was just too short to cover answers for.

a new future for otome?

I mentioned earlier that I feel it tries to wear too many hats and fill too many roles to really excel in any of the categories the game is listed in. And I think that’s the biggest downfall of Homicipher in general: balancing all its parts.

I also think that combining all those parts brings an entirely new experience to players who have ran through the gambit of romance games and visual novels. Having so many different interactions in Homicipher has left me craving more from my other romance games.

I love visual novels. But what Homicipher showed me is a step towards innovating otome. Or you could say it was a step closer to the roots of otome that has long been lost by formulaic models that offer choices and little else. With some better balancing of story and puzzles, I think the outcome could end up as popular as other visual novel styled games like Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton.

Homicipher may not have hit every mark for me, but it was an enjoyable experience and has left me excited for the future of romance games.