It's new to me: J.B. Harold Murder Club

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.The graphic adventure genre, which sits somewhere in between what the likes of Ron Gilbert would consider to be point-and-click adventures and a pure visual novel, was given its modern shape in the 1980s. While 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure bequeathed its name to the overall “adventure” genre, it was entirely text-based — future developers would riff on the concept with the technology to come, resulting in Chunsoft’s Yuji Horii, for instance, making The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983, which he would then use as the basis for foundational role-playing game, Dragon Quest, just a few years later. Loads of text, yes, but also graphics and menus. So many menus.At the same time that Horii and Chunsoft…