I’ve been going back and forth on Trials of Innocence since I first heard about it. Ace Attorney is one of my favorite series, so any game that wears that influence this openly gets my attention immediately. Going in, I wasn’t sure whether “openly inspired by Ace Attorney” would mean something thoughtful or just a skin swapped clone running through the same beats with new character names. Having played through it, I don’t think it’s a clone. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s not quite the equal of the games it’s drawing from either, and for almost every smart choice it makes, it runs into a rough edge that keeps it from fully landing.
The setup gets you invested fast. Luna Ray, a former teenage prosecutor turned rookie defense attorney, ends up working alongside Charlie Drake at his law firm, five years after a case that got both his mentor Amun Thomas and his client Saines English killed and left him chasing a criminal organization called SkyShield. Luna was on the opposing side of that same case, known afterward as Incident No. 761, as the prosecutor. Their paths crossing again, now on the same side of the courtroom, gives the whole story a personal throughline that most Ace Attorney-inspired games don’t bother setting up this carefully before the first trial even starts.
Silas Schubert, one of the prosecutors Luna and Charlie face off against, is genuinely one of the better prosecutor rivals I’ve run into in this genre, morose and strategic in a way that keeps him from feeling like a simple obstacle. Stella Ray, Luna’s older sister and a considerably more aggressive prosecutor, gives the courtroom scenes a family tension the Ace Attorney games rarely attempt this directly. Even small details, like how each attorney points during cross-examination, Silas conventionally, Charlie with two fingers, Luna with her whole palm, Stella by throwing her arm out sideways, tell you the writers were thinking about character all the way down to gesture work.
Where the game earns real credit is in how it handles its culprits. Ace Attorney has always flirted with sympathetic killers, but Trials of Innocence leans into it harder and more consistently, treating most of its “true culprit” reveals as tragedies to understand rather than villains to unmask. The final case specifically plays with this in a way I wasn’t expecting, building toward a resolution more interested in circumstance and consequence than a clean villain unmasking. It’s not handled with perfect consistency across all five cases, but the ambition is real, and it’s the kind of writing choice that separates this from a straight imitation.
The scale backs that ambition up. The script runs past 500,000 words across five main cases, and that density shows in how tangled the plot gets by the end, SkyShield’s fingerprints turning up in cases that initially look completely unconnected. A small running gag, showing your lawyer’s license, triggers more than a hundred unique optional dialogues scattered through the game, the kind of detail that rewards curiosity without ever being necessary to progress. New mechanical wrinkles help keep that scale from feeling like a slog too: a Brainstorm mode lets you step back and review known facts when you’re stuck, a Confrontation mode pits you directly against a prosecutor in faster verbal sparring outside the standard testimony structure, and a Mind Link system has you connecting related keywords rather than just presenting a single piece of evidence at the right moment. None of these systems get explained with much hand-holding, and if you’re new to the genre, the pileup of distinct mechanics in the opening hours might leave you a little lost before it clicks.
Character art comes from an anime-inspired style built specifically on top of the original 2015 mobile release’s artwork, with the team using frame-by-frame animation rather than simpler keyframe techniques to keep character movement feeling more expressive. I still found several emotionally heavy scenes playing out with less physical movement than the writing was clearly reaching for, a gap between the animation technique used and how much it actually gets to do in the moment. Music comes from composer credit ino-Studio with sound design handled separately, and the score leans into moody, dramatic cues during testimony without ever fighting for attention against the dialogue itself.
Voice acting covers the full dialogue script, but only in Chinese. Shorter system phrases and stock reactions can be switched between Chinese, Japanese, and English in the options menu, though that setting doesn’t touch the actual story dialogue, which stays Chinese regardless of what you pick. That’s worth knowing clearly before you start, since the menu doesn’t make the distinction obvious on its own. The performances themselves carry real weight, particularly during the courtroom confrontations, and series voice director Shanxin got a cast that sells both Silas’s quiet intensity and Stella’s louder aggression convincingly, even for readers like me who don’t speak Chinese and are relying entirely on subtitles to follow along.
Now here’s where I have to be honest about the rough edges, because there are real ones. The English translation carries noticeable grammatical stumbles throughout, and a few times I had to reread a piece of evidence description twice just to figure out what specific detail I was actually supposed to be pointing at, which matters more in a genre built entirely around presenting exactly the right piece of evidence at exactly the right moment. I ran into some UI lag during a couple of the more demanding puzzle sequences too, exactly the moments where snappy response time matters most.
C&D Games built this as a small Chinese studio, remaking their own 2015 mobile release, which never left the Chinese market the first time, into a considerably larger, fully localized Steam release. It’s also worth knowing that the game had a bumpy road just staying available on Steam. A DMCA claim pulled it down for roughly two months after its initial 2025 release before it was reinstated, something I can’t speak to in detail beyond noting it happened, but worth knowing about if you go looking at its storefront history and find a gap.
Verdict
Trials of Innocence is a five-case, 500,000-word courtroom mystery that leans into the Ace Attorney formula more directly and confidently than most games inspired by it, backed by a genuinely compelling prosecutor in Silas and a willingness to treat its culprits with real sympathy rather than simple condemnation. Rough English localization, animation that doesn’t always keep pace with the writing’s bigger emotional swings, and dialogue voiced only in Chinese regardless of your language settings are real, tangible costs to the experience.
