Edepth Angel: Pinocchio's Murder

My first instinct with a game this quiet on Steam was to dig past the storefront silence and find out whether the craft justified the obscurity. What I found is a Ren'Py-built otome visual novel adapted from Altabestudio's long-running webcomic, and it carries both the warmth of that source material and the rough edges you'd expect from a passion project that never quite found its audience. You play as Angel, a cyborg nurse who doubles as a human-clone, investigating a cold case tangled inside the fractured memories of two brothers: the volatile CEO Lien Lei and his quieter, secrets-hoarding half-sibling Kolei. Their father Seon looms over everything as a third route unlocked partway through the other two. The central mechanic asks you to collect evidence, sort true memories from implanted ones, then lay that evidence out on a timeline and present it to a character whose personality shapes how they receive it. Miss the timeline match and you get a bittersweet ending, but the game hands you another piece of evidence and lets you keep going rather than hard-locking you out. That's a generous design choice, and it means the investigation loop feels exploratory rather than punishing. The world-building is the real draw here. The Lei family's history, the ethics of memory implantation, the question of whether cyborgs manufactured as weapons can reclaim their own humanity, these threads are handled with more sincerity than you'd expect from a small indie title. The Pinocchio framing runs surprisingly deep. The prose has uneven patches and the pacing in early chapters leans slow, but if you've spent time with visual novels that open quietly before the weight of their story lands, this is a familiar contract. The developer confirmed a runtime of around 60,000 words, roughly six hours for an average reader, which is an honest, well-proportioned length for what the story needs to say. It knows when to end, and that matters. The Steam release is noticeably bare: no achievements, no trading cards, only a handful of reviews to guide you. Community discussions mention that the investigation segments can stump players enough that a guide becomes necessary, which is worth knowing upfront. The artwork in CG scenes clearly reflects the comic's visual identity, and a limited voice acting layer adds texture without overpromising. If you are already a reader of the E-Depth Angel webcomic, this is a meaningful companion piece. If you arrive cold, the game is self-contained enough to work, but newcomers may find the emotional stakes take longer to ignite.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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