Aviary Attorney

Aviary Attorney is structured like an Ace Attorney case but rendered in the actual ink drawings of 19th-century French caricaturist J. J. Grandville. The cast — falcons, sparrows, bears in waistcoats, frogs in judicial robes — is lifted directly from his published anthropomorphic illustrations, animated lightly so the historical art does the heavy lifting.

You play Monsieur Jayjay Falcon, a defense lawyer of questionable competence, alongside his apprentice Sparrowson. Investigations send you across a Paris on the brink of the 1848 revolution: Notre-Dame, the Louvre, the docks, the prisons that fill up faster than the courts can empty them. Witnesses get interviewed, evidence gets collected, and in court you cross-examine until contradictions surface.

The soundtrack pulls from compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns, including pieces from Carnaval des Animaux that line up almost too well with the bird-pun-saturated dialogue. Three distinct endings track which clients you take, which you betray, and where your sympathies land as the city's barricades go up around you.