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17 reviews · 2 essays
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Walking and Deducing — The Boundary from Gone Home to Return of the Obra Dinn
The 'walk and read' experience Gone Home and Firewatch refined, versus the 'actively deduce' experience of Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol. Where is the line between them? A designer's reading of the fault line between walking simulators and deduction puzzles, with Her Story and Outer Wilds in between.
Soundtrack: The Case of the Golden Idol — grey music for frozen time
The OST Kyle Misko wrote in wartime Lviv for The Case of the Golden Idol: cold 18th-century England fused with new-age ambient, looping beside a frozen crime scene and never rushing your deduction. On the design of music that refuses to react — and what a composer can steal from it.
Related reviews
Tangle Tower
A hand-drawn, fully voiced detective adventure: a painter's murder in a strange mansion, solved by interrogating suspects, pairing the clues you gather, and cracking the puzzles hidden through the tower. SFB Games' 2019 follow-up to Detective Grimoire.
puzzlemysteryadventureThe Shapeshifting Detective
A murder-mystery FMV in which a detective can shapeshift into anyone they've met to draw out secrets no one would tell a cop. The killer is picked at random each new game, and 1,600+ live-action clips branch on your choices — from D'Avekki Studios, makers of The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker.
mysteryfmvadventureSquareCells
A tiny logic puzzle that crosses Picross with Minesweeper: fill or break each square in a hidden grid using only the surrounding clues, where a number in a cell tells you how many cells it connects to. No guessing — every solution is reachable by pure deduction. By Matthew Brown, creator of Hexcells.
puzzlelogicnonogram-like14 Minesweeper Variants
A pure-logic puzzle collection that rewrites the rules of classic Minesweeper in fourteen ways (and then some), stripping out luck and guessing so that swapping a single line of the rules opens up endlessly different deductions. From Artless Games and Alith Games.
puzzlelogicminesweeper-likeChinatown Detective Agency
A cybernoir point-and-click set in near-future Singapore, where you run a detective agency and crack international cases by researching real facts in a browser outside the game. General Interactive Co.'s experiment hands the last step of every clue to the live web.
deductionobservationmysteryDuck Detective: The Secret Salami
A 2.5D observation-and-deduction adventure where a down-on-his-luck duck detective peers at evidence and slots words into fill-in-the-blank sentences to crack the case of a stolen lunch. Happy Broccoli Games takes the Golden Idol style and makes it light, fully voiced, and pun-heavy.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleDo Not Feed the Monkeys
A digital voyeur simulator: watch strangers - 'monkeys' - through surveillance cameras, pick clues from their rooms and talk, and pin down who they are with a notepad and a search engine. Blackmail, help, or look away, all while juggling rent, food and sleep. A game by Fictiorama Studios.
observationdeductionsimulationMurder by Numbers
A 2D visual-novel-meets-picross set in 1996 Los Angeles, where out-of-work actress Honor and a discarded robot named SCOUT solve nonogram puzzles to uncover clues and chase a murder case. Published by The Irregular Corporation, with music by Ace Attorney composer Masakazu Sugimori and character art by Hatoful Boyfriend's Hato Moa.
puzzlelogicmysteryLucifer Within Us
An isometric detective game where you scrub testimony timelines and jab at contradictions to solve murders, piecing together motive, means, and opportunity in a daemon-haunted theocracy — from Kitfox Games.
mysteryobservationnarrative-puzzleShadows of Doubt
A first-person detective sim set in a procedurally generated 1980s noir city. Gather fingerprints, CCTV, receipts and call logs, pin them to an evidence board, and name the killer out of a fully simulated crowd — every citizen with a name, a job and a life of their own. From ColePowered Games.
mysteryimmersive-simfirst-personThe Rise of the Golden Idol
A 2D deduction adventure where you click through frozen crime scenes and drop harvested words into blanks to reconstruct who did what, why, and in what order. A standalone sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, set across twenty linked cases in the 1970s.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleBotany Manor
A first-person puzzle set in an 1890s English manor, where you play retired botanist Arabella Greene and deduce each forgotten plant's ideal growing conditions from letters, posters, and clippings to coax it into bloom. Reading clues and binding them to a herbarium page is the core verb.
puzzlefirst-personTametsi
A 2D deduction puzzle where you flag hidden mines using only each tile's adjacency clues. It strips the luck from Minesweeper and layers colours, row/column totals and non-square tilings across 100-plus boards hand-built by Grip Top Games.
puzzlelogicStrange Horticulture
A 2D occult deduction puzzle in which you identify each plant that arrives at your counter by matching it against an almanac and the clues you gather, then use its effects to answer customers and steer the story. Made by the UK’s Bad Viking, it unravels foggy Undermere’s mysteries with a cat and a single book.
puzzlemysteryThe Roottrees are Dead
A first-person deduction puzzle: scour the early, dial-up-era Internet plus books and articles to establish who is truly blood-related to a crashed dynasty, filling in the blanks of their family tree. Evil Trout Inc.'s reworking of a free Global Game Jam browser game.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleHexcells Infinite
A Minesweeper-lineage logic puzzle: find the hidden blue cells on a hex grid using only adjacency counts, line hints and consecutive/non-consecutive markers — pure deduction, no guessing. Matthew Brown's third entry layers an endless puzzle generator over 36 hand-made boards.
puzzlelogic-deductionminimalistThe Case of the Golden Idol
A deduction game: examine frozen crime-scene tableaus, gather words from the evidence, and fill in the blanks to reconstruct each murder across an 18th-century mystery.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzle
