4/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Oh. FINALLY. At last, The Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog seems to be getting things back on track. Sega really listened to the fans here, combining only the best elements of the classic, adventure and boost games to finally make what I would call the ideal Sonic game. That’s right, a pretty charming and cute visual novel. Nobody believed me when I said this was a good direction for the series, but who’s laughing now?! Okay, April Fools, but The Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog is pretty good nonetheless. In real life and in universe, this whole murder mystery thing isn’t anything other than an excuse to hang out with fun characters from the Sonic series. There’s a lot of simple yet sweet character driven humour, it has the aura of being in an escape room with some friends, if that makes any sense. There’s a lot of simple stuff, like when you’re having to disarm this fake bomb and a shit ton of options of what to do appear, and the main character made just for this game having to play this Sonic minigame to actually have thoughts. I also like how at the end you can pick three random options for how the rest of his life turned out which has absolutely no bearing on the game at all. Good stuff, none of this is really laugh-out-loud funny, but it makes for a super pleasant time. The art in this game also strikes me, most of it seems to be done by a separate team and it honestly looks really good. There’s some really nice pixel art for the Sonic minigame, and the main art looks really great. I don’t know how to describe this, but there’s something of an ascended quality to the renders here. Even over something like the beautiful IDW comics (which I haven’t read so forgive me if I could be making a comparison with those right now but haven’t.) In general this game just has the sweet finesse of a great Sonic fangame, which I really love. The story itself is pretty great, if I have one problem with it it’s that I don’t feel the mystery itself is very fleshed out, but 1. That’s not the point, and 2. I don’t feel like nitpicking a sweet little April Fools’ game. I will say though the ending kind of goes in an interesting direction that actually caught me off guard. I won’t spoil it. For any fan of the world and these characters, The Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog ironically is a must-play. Game studios should do April Fools’ jokes like this more often! Grade: A- Difficulty: D-