I want to shill this game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1746030/Murders_on_the_Yangtze_River/
It's a Chinese Ace Attorney like game, fully translated into English and done so competently.
The gameplay is essentially identical to Ace Attorney Investigations with a few minor changes. It's fundamentally a detective story and though you rarely actually go to a courtroom you usually end up in a situation 'akin' to court where you have to convince an authority figure about the circumstances in a way that feels immediately familiar.
But it's not just... Ace Attorney with a Chinese spin. It has its own flavor to it. It's much more serious, with only sporadic comedic elements. No wacky witnesses or dramatic breakdowns. It's a much more rapidly paced, going through 6 chapters in about 15 hours of total runtime. There's no case that feels like 'filler' and the entire narrative is wrapped around this one mega-cold case that the protagonist continually revisits multiple times throughout the entire story before it all comes to a head in the finale.
It's not perfect. It's decidedly lower budget than Ace Attorney games. There are a few instances of Adventure Game Logic you'll have to parse through. One puzzle I had to look up the answer to. There is a single, inexplicably placed, 15 minute long stealth section that sucks so much it almost made me quit. The game has for reasons entirely unclear to me created 2 lockpicking mini-games for the grand total of 3 locks you break in the ENTIRE GAME.
But you can feel the love they've put into so much else. This game, for example, has diagetic voice acting for the majority of the major scenes. As in characters speak Chinese to each other in China, English to each other in London, and in Shanghai bilingual characters will literally switch languages mid-sentence depending on who they're addressing. It is clear that there are different VAs for each 'language' for the same character but the fact that they went this far to make bilingualism an actual aspect of the plot is amazing to me. And I'm no historian so I can't speak for the accuracy, but it uses its setting (pre Revolutionary China) in an amazing way, with cases all tying into some kind of cultural or historical anxiety faced in that era. They even include small blurbs giving historical context to conflicts when they pop up, so that when characters talk around each other or use strange metaphors the meaning is still communicated through.
More than anything else though... this game nails the mystery. At least for me it's right in that absolute perfect middle ground, where I'm one step behind the protagonists and rarely if ever figuring things out before the game expects me to. The murders get wild, the plots get convoluted and the final case, good lord, this game's final case is insanely good. I also laughed for a good minute when I finally realized the conceit of the game's main overarching conspiracy. It is ripped from the headlines in the best way possible.
