[DaBackpack]

In an interview, Ryukishi07 said this:

After writing four chapters, the world’s layout has become very firm, so the actual writing went very smoothly. Instead, the hard part this time around was “arranging the hints”. We want Umineko to be a product people can enjoy as they think, and we paid a lot of attention to the balance between making it fun to read and including the right number of hints. Our goal is to write a story which gives hints to people who don’t know the truth and reaffirms the views of people who do understand. We could have written it so that the truth was plainly clear and everyone could understand it, but we believe that might have effected how interesting a read it would have become. The other difficult thing was positioning a message to the readers that “it is solvable at this point”. In classic mysteries, the “sign” is always the time that the detective says “I know who the culprit is”. However, I think we failed to add such a sign in Episode 4. You really should be able to solve it as a mystery with the information given up to and including Episode 4, but because we didn’t give a “sign”, people thought “there aren’t enough hints yet”, and few people seriously tried to solve the series. When we saw this, we thought “yes, a clear sign really is needed”, and a “sign” appeared in Episode 5 as: “And then………I……knew.”

The mystery is solveable with information up to Episode 4. Random interjection ^^;

Also,

Yeah, I’ll bet. Many hints will appear in EP5 as well. When the pivotal answers come out in EP6 and EP7, I suggest that you replay starting from EP1 and enjoy how early on the foreshadowing begins. Like when you get a new key in an RPG, and return to the very first dungeon to get a treasure chest behind a door that you couldn’t open before(laughs). That’s an especially fun part of Umineko. Even now, there are many things you’ll understand if you go back to EP1. But there are still many treasure chests waiting in EP1 that can’t be opened yet. After playing EP5, EP6, and EP7, you might go back to EP1 and think “This is a huge clue” or “It’s almost obvious!”