Soundtrack: Murder by Numbers — the sound of filling one cell at a time in a neon-lit L.A. detective show

Introduction — a salvaged robot and the sound of a slightly worn lounge

In 1996, Honor Mizrahi — an actress just fired from the TV detective show "Murder Miss Terri" — fishes a memory-wiped robot named SCOUT out of a trash heap, and the two are soon pulled into real murder cases. In this nonogram-meets-adventure game Murder by Numbers, which Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is electric piano, brushed drums, and a faintly retro synth — the light, dapper lounge sound of a 1990s cop-show opening.

It was written by Masakazu Sugimori, the composer behind the first Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Viewtiful Joe, and Ghost Trick, working out of Osaka. For developer Mediatonic and for Sugimori alike, this was his first contribution to a game led outside Japan. The soundtrack was released in March 2021 through Black Screen Records across 30 tracks (about 72 minutes). Tempos vary, but by ear the baseline is mid-speed — a pulse a touch faster than walking, like the gait of chasing down a case.

The five "Puzzle -" tracks — music written for the time you spend filling cells

The soundtrack has five tracks whose titles begin with "Puzzle -": The Unbeatable Duo, The Digital Detective, On The Right Path, Got Your Back, and Towards the Truth. These are not cues for dialogue or staging; they are loops written specifically to play only while you are solving a nonogram. I admire that assignment itself. Where many games would simply reuse an exploration cue, Murder by Numbers went to the trouble of writing separate "music for the time you spend thinking."

A nonogram is a logic puzzle where you decide, from the numbers on each row and column, whether to fill a cell or cross it out. Your hand pauses, your eyes shuttle between the clues and the grid, and you fill one more square — and over that repetition these tracks lay a seamless propulsion of jazzy basslines and light drums. By ear, somewhere around 110–130 BPM: fast enough for your fingers to ride the rhythm, not so fast that it rushes you. Crucially, the harmony keeps shifting its expression just enough that a two-and-a-half to nearly three minute loop never wears thin, so long deliberation never makes the music sound like it's "going in circles."

This, I think, is where puzzle-game music differs decisively from ordinary background scoring. The composer cannot know when the player will finish. Thirty seconds for one person, five minutes for another. So the track has to be natural to exit at any length and un-worn by staying — it must shoulder both at once.

The lie of being inside a TV show — Honor's Theme and the Ace Attorney bloodline

The world of Murder by Numbers is campy 1990s TV culture through and through: sound stages, glitzy award shows, drag clubs. The music is the device that makes this setting hold together as a lie — "you are inside a TV drama right now." Honor's Theme in particular is a track disguised as the theme song of the show-within-the-show, and the album closes with a vocal version (Honor's Theme (Vocal Ver.)). The vocals are by Scottish singer Bright Light Bright Light (Rod Thomas), and the lyrics were written by the game's designer-writer Ed Fear. That the lyricist is the writer, not the composer, tells you exactly that this is part of the fiction of "the show's theme song."

And we mustn't forget the bloodline. Sugimori composed the first Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and Murder by Numbers inherits that courtroom drama's genes in the structure of its visual-novel scenes and the breath of its interrogations. The way a sound rises the moment you "present" evidence, the modulation as you step one pace closer to the truth — if a player feels an odd déjà vu, it isn't chance. It's the same hand writing the same grammar of tension across twenty years.

The analogy to the puzzle — the repetition of filling a grid, and looping harmony

Solving a nonogram feels not linear but iterative. You read the numbers, fill the cells you can confirm, move your eyes to another row, cross-check against the column you filled a moment ago. Advancing and backtracking in small increments, the picture slowly surfaces. I think this sensation of "confirming a little at a time" resonates well with the loop structure of Sugimori's puzzle cues.

A good puzzle loop doesn't merely repeat the same eight bars. The bass keeps the same stride while the upper chords and ornaments shift color subtly with each pass. The player's sense of their hand making progress and the music's sense of quietly changing expression as it goes gently sync beneath awareness. It doesn't rush you, yet it won't let you stall. The release of solving is left to a sound effect and jingle rather than the music, while the act of thinking is kept on a purely smooth pulse — this division of labor is, to my ear, the very core of what makes the puzzle segments of Murder by Numbers feel so good.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with the face of the show, Honor's Theme. It holds the lightness of a lounge cut and the skeleton of a nostalgic TV theme song at once. Via the official audio (Black Screen Records channel).

Then the star of this piece, one of the puzzle-only loops, Puzzle - On The Right Path. Hear for yourself the propulsion written for fingers filling in cells.

If you want to hear the show's theme song become an actual song, try Honor's Theme (Vocal Version) ↗ (vocals: Bright Light Bright Light / lyrics: Ed Fear). For the whole album, Black Screen Records on Bandcamp ↗.

Closing — what I'd steal if I were composing

If I were to steal from Murder by Numbers, first would be the very idea of "a dedicated cue for the time spent thinking." Plenty of composers assign music to exploration, dialogue, and combat, but the perspective of designing "the few minutes a player spends silently, hand stopped, thinking" as an independent musical situation works beyond puzzle games too. A loop that doesn't wear out over a long stay — a bass keeping the same stride under upper voices that change color each pass — is a recipe I want to try in my own work.

The second is the touch of embedding a "theme song of a show-within-the-show," like Honor's Theme, into the fiction by having the writer, not the composer, pen its lyrics. It treats music not as something merely played but as a prop that props up the world's setting. Put on Puzzle - Towards the Truth while you work and feel how your fingers stay on the rhythm without stalling. And if you want to follow the same Sugimori bloodline, extend your ear to our piece on The Turing Test, or to the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney as a grammar for building courtroom tension in sound.