J.B. Harold Murder Club

Overview

J.B. Harold: Murder Club, also known simply as Murder Club, is a menu-driven adventure game developed by Riverhill Soft which debuted the titular detective in the long-running J.B. Harold franchise. The game was written and designed by Rika Suzuki, who would later go on to pen Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory at Cing.

Release History

The game was initially released in Japan for the NEC PC-88 in 1986 and was later ported to various Japanese computers and home consoles including the MSX in 1988 and later the Famicom in 1989. The title was also remade in 1988 for the Sharp X68000 which featured new digitized graphics, mouse support, and a bilingual function that let the player experience the game in English. The same feature was also included in the 1992 FM Towns port.

In North America, an MS-DOS version of Murder Club was released in 1989 by Kyodai Software. The MS-DOS release was almost identical to the PC-88 original but featured a slightly different color palette and the names of certain characters and locations were changed such as doctor "Simon Randle" now being called "Steven Beckert." Eventually a Turbografx-CD port of the X68000 remake was released in Japan by Hudson in 1990 which made its way to America via NEC Home Electronics in 1991. The Turbografx version contained voice acting and the same English script used in the MS-DOS release but with censored curse words and the original character names.

Murder Club would then be remade once again, along with some of its sequels, for Windows computers in 1996. These introduced new art assets that would be used in all future ports of the title. After Riverhill Soft went bankrupt, Althi took over development duties for the J.B. Harold franchise and ported Murder Club to mobile phones in 2004, the Nintendo DS in 2008, iOS in 2010 and finally the Nintendo Switch in 2017.

Story

Wealthy philanderer Bill Robbins is found dead in the town of Liberty. The player must deduce the culprit from a large list of suspects who wanted him gone, and solve the murder.

Gameplay

The game is an adventure game using a menu-driven interface. The player moves around from region to region, investigating hotspots for clues and interrogating suspects and other NPCs in the vicinity.