I'm getting the same issue where agreeing to the "she could identify the killer" thing simply fails. People talked about it earlier. I don't understand.
Edit: Ok I see this was incorrect info someone posted.
I won't mince words, but I will caveat this with all the usual disclaimers - making anything is tough, what we have represents a lot of work and dedication, and I wouldn't even be commenting at all if I didn't think the project had things going for it.
I would say the trial system is overdesigned or underimplemented. The end result is not fun in practice and it's definitely a game where you reach for a guide almost immediately. I think others fairly pointed out that it's very fussy regarding when it would accept a player input without marking it as an error. It's missing any sort of explanatory text to illustrate why it doesn't work here. Also, I'd say that the 4 player options to interact is possibly too many if they're all just going do nothing 99% of the time. This is what I mean by overdesigned or underimpleneted - either this should have been simpler, or there should have been a lot more utility, but as is it's just very sparse and frustrating. Given that this is a narrowly scoped indie project, I think keeping it simpler would have been an easier ask rather than writing 8x more dialogues and interacts to do all this stuff where you have red herrings and things that give custom responses based on what you do. As tempting as it is to think "what if players can easily brute force this with fewer options?" I think the bigger danger is making them check out completely or go to guide straight away.
I'd also comment that the interface flows are clunky, on two occasions I quit to menu accidentally when I was trying to close my inventory by clicking menu. If it quits to main menu and loses your progress the minimum it should offer is an "are you sure?" but failing that, it shouldn't be there in the same spot your go to inventory button was. It's just an unintentional user trap.
It's naturally too late to suggest core changes to this game, nobody is going to throw it out and start over, but I can't help but think about contingencies. While obviously this seems inspired by Ace Attorney type products (maybe others - not sure), I think an alternative would have been to look to games like "Contradiction" - where you're given itemised lists of statements from each testimony, and then you combine them to figure out where people have contradicted themselves. That game has it's own problems in terms of design, but I think the concept is good for allowing the player to really sit and think about the statements everyone made and use their brain to figure things out without replaying dialogues over and over to try and figure out where you were supposed to pipe up with a specific type of reaction. Even with the 4 types of interactions, you could still probably use that design with this - you'd mark statements where you think they're distractions, or where you have evidence to contradict that statement, and then there could be enough fuzz that maybe you can get a win with only 90% correct instead of needing to identify just 1-2 things to nail the case and everything else screams "wrong wrong wrong" when you click as you watch your health bar go down.
