Become a Master Detective from the comfort of your desk
Become a Master Detective from the comfort of your desk
There’s something about solving a mystery in a game that makes you feel amazing! The act of piecing together clues, pointing the finger, and having that breakthrough moment of solving the final mystery is a feeling like no other.
Psychologically speaking, solving mysteries can give us a regular sense of accomplishment and closure that we often lack on a day to day basis. Video games stacked with mysteries are great, simple ways to live out the fantasies that allow us to have this sense of accomplishment.
Here are some great mystery games that will really get your brain working!
Very Positive (94%) | $14.99
Aviary Attorney is the only game that has dared to ask the question: “What if Sherlock didn’t have his life together at all, Watson was a snarky know-it-all, and everyone was a bird?” In Aviary Attorney, you take the role of Jayjay Falcon, a competent lawyer whose law firm has fallen on some hard times.
You also have your trusted friend and dearest annoyance, Sparrowsman, who takes the role of your John Watson or Maya Fey. The two of you travel all over mid-19th century Paris on a hunt to solve crimes. Along the way, you meet a large and colorful cast of interesting characters, from cats to frogs to snakes, this take on the idea behind Zootopia won’t leave you disappointed.
This visual novel kicked off with a super successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, and has been riding strong ever since, continuing to be released on new consoles up to the Switch.
Purchase Aviary Attorney here.
Very Positive (85%) | $19.99
Rockstar has made a name for itself creating games that really know how to stand the test of time, and LA Noire is no different. There’s just something about Rockstar’s amazingly immersive open worlds that keep us coming back.
LA Noire drops you into the shoes of a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department climbing the squad ranks in a country fresh off winning World War 2. You get to solve grisly murders by approaching and interviewing the suspects and witnesses yourself.
It’s also a game with plenty of side quests and collectibles, so it can keep you entertained for quite a while.
Like with many Rockstar franchises, LA Noire has been rereleased several times. Even though it was released in 2011, it was a year one title on the Switch in 2017, and it was given VR support in 2018. The game has also lived on in the meme zeitgeist ever since its release, and several recognizable memes came from this game.
Purchase LA Noire here.
Overwhelmingly Positive (98%) | $19.99
I get it, to most people cultural anthropology sounds boring. Chants of Senaar, though, takes the idea of diving through languages and cultures to a new level by throwing you into a world where you don’t know anything and have nothing but a notebook. You take control as a wanderer on the hunt for language.
Through intense trial and error and tons of conversations, you gain the tools necessary to decode the many languages of the game’s world and facilitate conversation between the different groups.
Purchase Chants of Senaar here.
Very Positive (93%) | $29.99
You’re probably familiar with Spike Chunsoft’s more famous properties, like Steins;Gate and Danganronpa, but around the time of Trigger Happy Havoc’s release, another mystery visual novel came out, Zero Escape: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. A couple years later, the series saw a sequel: Virtue’s Last Reward.
The Nonary Games is a collection of the first two games in the series, updated to better function on computers. They play as half visual novel, half point and click escape room, taking place in a death game where nine participants have a limited amount of time to escape all the rooms and reach freedom before the illusive Zero, the mastermind behind each game, can take their lives.
Zero Escape is infamous for having overly-complicated plotlines and grand, game-spanning mysteries. While the level of mystery isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s all the more satisfying when you can piece everything together and really solve what’s happening in one of these games.
Purchase Zero Escape: The Nonary Games here.
Overwhelmingly Positive (95%) | $19.99
It may be impossible to describe what exactly What Remains of Edith Finch is. You could call it a walking simulator, because there is a lot of moderately slow, pensive movement. You could call it a minigame collection, because so much of the plot happens through a dozen or so short, unique moments of gameplay. Maybe, to you, Edith Finch is an adventure game, since it takes place throughout one long exploration of a house.
Edith Finch is an incredibly unique game in which the titular character, Edith, who is also the last surviving member of her bloodline, explores her ancestral family home in search of answers to what happened to her lineage. You get to explore each family member’s story going back several generations, and get to understand their experience in their own words.
This was the first game published by the now-prolific Annapurna Interactive, who have also graced the world with games like the world-bending puzzle game Gorogoa, the cyberpunk cat explorer Stray, and the fast-paced FPS platformer Neon White. They’re a publisher with no misses. Couple that with the fact that Edith Finch was developed by Giant Sparrow, the same studio that made The Unfinished Swan, another mystery game that’s practically impossible to describe, and you have a hit.
Purchase What Remains of Edith Finch here.
Hopefully those are enough to have you feeling like the world’s next greatest detective! Solving any one mystery from one of these games should do a wonder for your self-esteem, so imagine how great it would be to play them all.
