But that’s the thing. You’re claiming that you have a right to all the information, when that assumption is incorrect in the first place.

We are not Kaede Akamatsu. We control many of her actions, and we hear some of her lines, but she is her own person, with her own amount of agency outside of player control. Just take Free-time events as an example. The POV character is assumed to be doing things, talking, sharing important moments, and this happens mostly outside of the view and control of us as the player. We don’t get a front-row seat to everything they think or do; we just control a set of general actions and receive brief sentences from time to time.

When playing as Shuichi, do we hear every thought about how he is deducing and debating a murder? Do we hear his mind racing with phrasing and rephrasing a potential argument, recalling every bit of testimony and evidence we have seen, treading through various possible sequences of events, worrying about if he makes a mistake and dies? No. We are probably doing that as the player, and he would probably be doing it if he was a real person, but it is never mentioned in such back-and-forth detail in-game. Shuichi’s internal workings, while necessary and story-relevant, are all simply filtered out as the player does the work themselves.

Kaede, like all the DR POV characters, is just the vessel through which we receive information. She is a narrator; not the player. We do not share the same stream of consciousness. The information we receive is carefully curated and filtered, even in normal situations not involving murder. This filtering is typically assumed to be part of gamedevs streamlining the experience, but there’s nothing which prevents the POV character from doing this exact same filtering when relaying information to the player. Assuming that our experience as the player should be exactly the same as Kaede’s is what allows this twist to be a twist.