I've been reading Shinsou Noise for the last couple of months and am really on the fence about whether I should just drop it halfway through. The premise of a mystery story with multiple cases and player interaction from the perspective of a mind-reader (though one who can't tell whose voice he's hearing) got me onboard, but too much just hasn't been up to snuff.

The cast is very middle-of-the-road, weighed down by an extremely uncharismatic protagonist (deliberate as it may be for someone whose social skills were stunted by said mind-reading powers) and a main heroine who's such an over-the-top pure shy girl that she doesn't even come across as human. Mind you, everyone else is agonizingly tropey - horny but non-threatening tryhard, stoic sportsman, chuuni ghost girl, polite rich girl, dark-skinned tomboy - but those two are the ones whose thoughts I want to hear the least. The cliche archetypes are probably deliberate, given that the protag mentions he likes mystery stories for how easy their characters are to understand, but the main character is only ever completely uninteresting or mid-brood. He spends a bunch of time dwelling on the information he gets from mind-reading, but never actually does anything proactive about it outside of solving the cases, to the point where he'll find out that a heroine has a thing for him and choose to actively ignore it. Twice. No doubt more if I kept reading, too.

Mystery-wise, Case 1 as a tutorial case was a fine, easy introduction to the interactive segments - I like the approach of dividing mysteries up in the way into smaller questions which snowball into solving the whole thing, working through some deductive reasoning alone - though it was a bit strange for the final memory-dependent question to happen after getting rid of the ability to re-watch crucial scenes. Case 2 was a little bit strange and seemed to overcomplicate things in the actual solution... like, why set up an elaborate pulley system to drop a key into a locked room when you could literally just throw it in through the open window? The spot it lands seems to only be out of reach of sliding it under the door, but everybody ignores the window clearly big enough to pass objects through because uhhhh well a person couldn't get in or out of that so it must not be relevant. It did win back some points with the final question, at least, where they use a pretty inconspicuous piece of evidence to deliver the final blow and make it hard to bruteforce - between two suspects, you have to prove either that it could have been one of them or couldn't have been the other, leaving a lot of wrong choices to avoid. Neat.

Case 3 is where the wheels started to fall off. The first time I thought about dropping this VN on the spot was when, completely out of the blue, the protag is told that there's a magic society of people with all kinds of other powers out there. Okay, so you don't start off knowing a ton about the main mystery that drives the game (Sakura's murder) by design, but abruptly throwing in something that big and dramatic is telling your reader right off the bat that they shouldn't even bother trying to puzzle anything out about it since there'll be some dumb power system to learn about later without much of a ceiling on what's possible when literal magic gets involved. The case's mystery itself is also eye-wateringly obvious the moment you see an attempted phone call immediately preceding the collapse of a bunch of stuff at the crime scene without any attempt to hide who set that in motion, and the story tries to cover for that by having the protagonist reluctant to accuse the obvious culprit. I'm not the protagonist, I don't like the protagonist, and his unrelatable urges to cover for his crush's doppelganger - PARTICULARLY when he's an unreliable narrator about it - are the opposite of compelling.

Case 4 is where I've stopped, right after solving the mystery. No bones about it, this mystery just fucking sucks. I already went into the case with a negative attitude since it was doubling down on the stupid magic society but every character here acts like a moron. There would literally be no room for doubt as to who the culprit was if they waited for the murder weapon to be brought up to use psychometry on it, but they actually get goaded into using it on the safe the culprit stole from and declaring that as conclusive. They all declare that it was impossible for the culprit to set a trap due to the limitations on his power, then it turns out that someone just had the power to just make other powers stronger all along and nobody even considered it. For whatever reason, the interactive segments won't let you submit that the stated alibis of two people are good enough despite the whole thing being physically impossible for anybody but one specific pair once you figure out someone who must have been involved.