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37 reviews · 9 essays
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Gyakuten Saiban: Yomigaeru Gyakuten (2005) — they added one case to a four-year-old game, and the series crossed the ocean
Episode 56 of “Today Is Release Day”: Gyakuten Saiban: Yomigaeru Gyakuten, known abroad as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Capcom released it on the Nintendo DS on September 15, 2005 — twenty-one years ago today. It was a port of a 2001 Game Boy Advance game with a single extra case bolted on. That one case, and an English mode that shipped inside the Japanese cartridge, carried the series out into the world.
The Decagon House Murders (1987) — The Debut That Answered Knox's Decalogue
In 1987, Yukito Ayatsuji's debut novel The Decagon House Murders trapped university students - each bearing the name of a Golden Age Western mystery writer - inside a ten-sided mansion on a deserted island, igniting Japan's "Shin Honkaku" (new-orthodox) mystery movement. Behind it lies a rulebook for fair play with the reader: S. S. Van Dine's 1928 Twenty Rules and Ronald Knox's 1929 Decalogue. That same rulebook is still cited today, down to Ryukishi07's Umineko no Naku Koro ni, a mystery game sold on Steam.
Soundtrack: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter — chords with the third removed, built to make you walk
For a mystery you wander with no map and no HUD, Mikolai Stroinski wrote a score of fourths and fifths that never commit to major or minor, seeding a solo-piano theme, Ethan's Theme, through the rest of the album in disguise. Doremi, coffee in hand, takes apart the hidden link between a game built from scattered memories you must reorder and a score built from a single theme's fragments you can't quite name.
Counterpoint on Gone Home — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Gone Home 8/10. I went through Steam's 4,198 negative reviews instead — "barely even a game," "two hours for twenty dollars," "an overhyped soap opera" — and tested five recurring claims against the game's design.
Inside Andrew Shouldice's Philosophy — designing the time before you understand
A study of TUNIC's Andrew Shouldice built only from what he has said in public. The three phases of a secret from his GDC 2023 talk — ignorance, knowledge, understanding — and his statement that the middle one interests him most. The policy that framing communication as a mystery makes "the revelation all the sweeter." The reviewer who beat the final boss in No Fail Mode, and the exception he added afterwards. Why refusing to filter players by difficulty was a definitional matter rather than a kindness. Ends with Kizuki's own reading.
Best Puzzles of H1 2026 — Mayoi's 10 Picks That Survived My Skepticism
Yesterday Komugi published his best-of list. I start by doubting it. A 96% score, an IGF award, a thousand reviews — these are records of majority votes, not proofs of quality. Here are ten games that survived my skepticism, including why a 63% 'Mixed' title sits at number one.
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.
Narrative Puzzles and Storyless Puzzles — Lorelei vs Stephen's Sausage Roll
The pure maneuvers of Stephen's Sausage Roll versus Lorelei and the Laser Eyes' solutions fused with story. What narrative and storyless puzzles each sell, contrasted from a designer's view across Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, COCOON, and Machinarium.
Observation as Play — Common Grammar of Witness, Obra Dinn, and Lorelei
The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes all turn the act of looking into a verb. A look at the grammar these three share.
Related reviews
Evan's Remains
A 2D puzzle adventure built from single-screen block puzzles — platforms that vanish once you step off them, blocks that switch other blocks on and off — carrying the story of Dysis, a girl searching for a missing boy named Evan. A game by maitan69.
puzzleplatform-puzzlenarrative-puzzleZero Escape: The Nonary Games
Two Spike Chunsoft mystery adventures in one package: nine people are locked inside a facility and must pass through numbered doors to get out. It bundles the DS-born Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors with its sequel Virtue's Last Reward, alternating first-person escape-room sections with branching novel sections.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleMachinika: Museum
A first-person puzzle box in which you scan alien devices of unknown origin delivered to a museum, peer inside them and reprint their missing parts until they run again. A short piece from Littlefield Studio that opens seven machines one at a time, with the touch of science-fiction archaeology.
puzzleescape-roomobservationPhoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
A courtroom adventure in which you play defense attorney Phoenix Wright, matching one line of testimony against one piece of evidence to break a lie. Capcom's collection gathers all fourteen episodes of the three games first released between 2001 and 2004, with the art redrawn frame by frame.
mysteryvisual-noveldeductionTrüberbrook
A point-and-click adventure in which Hans Tannhauser, an American physicist who has won a trip to a remote West German village in 1967, chases a stolen physics paper and walks into a story about another dimension. Made by the German studio btf, with sets built as real miniatures and photographed.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureContradiction: Spot the Liar!
A live-action (FMV) murder mystery in which Detective Inspector Frederick Jenks spends one evening - 5pm to midnight - reopening a drowning in the small English village of Edenton. You interview the residents, collect what they say, then pair two statements that clash and confront the liar to unlock the next thread. Designed and scored by Tim Follin for Baggy Cat.
mysteryfmvdeductionUnderground Blossom
A point-and-click escape puzzle that rides down seven metro stations through the life of a woman named Laura. You buy a ticket, search each room, and reassemble the pieces of her memory. A 2023 release from Rusty Lake, the studio behind the Cube Escape series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickescape-roomAI: The Somnium Files
A detective adventure set in near-future Tokyo, in which a one-eyed police detective works a serial murder case alongside the artificial intelligence housed in his prosthetic eye. First-person investigation scenes alternate with third-person 'Somnium' dives into a suspect's dream, where a six-minute budget must be spent to open Mental Locks, and an in-game flowchart lets you walk the branches toward several endings. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi of the Zero Escape series, from Spike Chunsoft.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleUnheard - Voices of Crime
A deduction adventure played over a top-down floor plan: you move between rooms and scrub a recording of the day back and forth, listening. There are no subtitles — you name the figures and answer the case questions using only what you heard. From NExT Studios.
mysteryobservationpuzzleStrange Antiquities
A 2D identification-and-deduction puzzler in which you mind an occult antiques shop in the lakeside town of Undermere, probing unlabelled objects by colour, touch, scent and inner perception, cross-referencing illustrated tomes, and handing each customer the item their trouble calls for — where what you hand over decides the town's fate.
puzzlemysteryGhost Trick: Phantom Detective
A puzzle adventure in which a newly dead protagonist possesses the objects around him, chains the single action each one owns, and rearranges the world in the four minutes before somebody dies. Directed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney for the Nintendo DS in 2010, brought to Steam by Capcom as an HD remaster.
puzzleadventuremysteryGone Home
A first-person exploration game: home on a rainy night in June 1995 after a year abroad, you open every door and drawer of an empty house and reconstruct a year of family history from the letters, cassettes and magazines left behind. No combat, no puzzles, no fail state — the verbs are open, pick up, read. The first game from Fullbright, founded by veterans of BioShock.
explorationobservationmysteryThe Room 4: Old Sins
A first-person contraption puzzler set inside an old dollhouse found in an attic: open the mechanism in one room, then carry what you find to the room that is missing a piece. The fourth entry in Fireproof Games' The Room series, rebuilt for PC.
puzzleobservationmysteryThimbleweed Park
A point-and-click adventure about a 1987 small-town murder, switching between five characters — two FBI agents, a ghost, a foul-mouthed clown and an aspiring game developer. Its nine-verb SCUMM-style interface was rebuilt for modern machines by the creators of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureThe Room Two
A first-person escape puzzler in which you peer at, rotate, and pry open strange clockwork boxes, using a special lens to reveal hidden marks. The second Room game widens from a single box to several interlocking contraptions, from the UK studio Fireproof Games.
puzzlemysteryobservation7 Days to End with You
A language-deduction novel: you wake with amnesia in a stranger's room and must work out the meaning of an unknown tongue, jotting your own interpretations into a word list. Replaying seven days, each solved word reshapes the story. A Lizardry game.
puzzleword-gamevisual-novelRusty Lake Paradise
As Jakob, eldest son of the Eilander family, you return to the island of Paradise after your mother's death to lift the ten plagues through her hidden memories and strange family rituals: a hand-drawn point-and-click of macabre, surreal puzzles from Rusty Lake, makers of the Cube Escape series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickmysteryEscape Academy
A first-person escape-room puzzle for one or two players, made by designers who build real-life escape rooms. Search each themed room, combine the scattered clues and enter the code to get out — from defusing bombs to hacking servers — wrapped in a light story about the faculty of a puzzle academy. Coin Crew Games' welcoming door into the genre.
puzzleescape-roommysteryTangle 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.
puzzlemysteryadventureQuern - Undying Thoughts
A first-person puzzle adventure: stranded on an island with no way back, you open some fifty doors by working gears, crystals and alchemy, and solved contraptions return, reused, so the whole island reads as one machine. A 2016 homage to Myst and Riven from the four-person studio Zadbox.
puzzleadventuremysteryThe 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.
mysteryfmvadventureThe Operator
A first-person investigation adventure worked entirely from one FDI computer console — video analyzer, databases, ChemScan, terminal — connecting evidence as the 'man in the chair' to unravel a conspiracy. Bureau 81's 2024 desktop thriller.
mysteryinvestigationnarrativeChinatown 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.
deductionobservationmysteryThe Room Three
A first-person escape puzzler set in a mansion on a remote island, where you peer through a lens at the boxes and mechanisms left by the Craftsman, uncovering hidden layers one at a time. The third Room game expands the series from a single box to a whole estate, built on one tactile verb and an eyepiece that multiplies what you can observe.
escape-roommysteryobservationThe Forgotten City
A first-person mystery-adventure set in an underground Roman city bound by a golden rule — if one person sins, everyone dies — where you relive a single day through a time loop, unravelling the city's doom through conversation and moral choice. By Modern Storyteller.
mysteryadventureinvestigationMurder 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-puzzleThe Sexy Brutale
At a masked ball, the guests are murdered one by one by the mansion's staff across a twelve-hour loop that resets each midnight. As a bystander in a bloodstained mask you eavesdrop from the shadows and wind the clock back and forth to read the choreography of each killing, then intervene before the victim dies. An isometric mystery puzzle by Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works.
puzzlemysteryadventureOverboard!
A reverse detective game aboard a 1930s ocean liner: as Veronica, who has just pushed her husband overboard, you have a few hours before the ship docks to bury the evidence and pin the crime on another passenger. Lie, bribe, seduce, or murder again — inkle (80 Days, Heaven's Vault) build countless perfect crimes from a handful of verbs.
mysterydetectivetime-loopParadise Killer
A first-person open-world detective adventure set on Paradise, an artificial island of alien-god worshippers where the ruling Council is murdered. Investigator Lady Love Dies gathers evidence, decides for herself who is guilty, and proves the case at trial — a whodunit with no single 'correct' answer, wrapped in a vaporwave world.
mysterydetectiveadventureShadows 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 Room
A first-person puzzler in which you peer at, rotate, and pry open a strange metal box one mechanism at a time. A special lens reveals marks invisible to the naked eye, and each box yields a smaller one within. Fireproof Games' tactile puzzle box, built around looking closely and touching.
puzzlemysteryTelling Lies
An FMV mystery where you search a database of secretly recorded video by the words spoken in it, reassembling four lives and one big lie from fragments. From Sam Barlow of Her Story, built on a single verb — search — that takes stories apart and rebuilds them.
narrative-puzzleobservationmysteryTwelve Minutes
A real-time, top-down thriller in a single apartment: you are killed, snap back to the moment you opened the door, and loop the same twelve minutes, using only what you have learned to break the cycle. Luis Antonio builds dread from few verbs and one room.
mysterynarrativetime-loopStrange 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.
puzzlemysteryIMMORTALITY
An FMV adventure built from the unreleased films of vanished actress Marissa Marcel. Pause the footage, click a face or an object to match-cut into another clip, and assemble the fragments to chase her disappearance. From Her Story's Sam Barlow, who reworks the verb 'search' from text into the visual.
fmvmysteryobservationHeaven's Vault
An archaeology adventure where you sail rivers of space, recover artefacts from forgotten ruins, and decipher an invented hieroglyphic script one word at a time from context. Built on a branching story that remembers your choices and a language you piece together yourself. From inkle, makers of 80 Days.
puzzlenarrativemystery
