There’s just something about solving mysteries in games. Piecing together clues, interrogating suspects, and finally discovering that oh-so-satisfying answer. It’s absolute magic.
Needless to say, I’m a bit of a genre obsessive—and particularly this year, I found myself sleuthing through a record number of modern classics.
I think 2025 was one of the best detective game years ever, if not the best. Who knows what it was about these particular twelve months that suddenly made the idea of criminals actually suffering consequences so appealing? That’s enough of me being hilarious—on with the list!
The CEO of a tech startup has been murdered, and you need to solve it by identifying the names, job titles, and even the pets of everyone who worked there.
Openly inspired by The Roottrees are Dead (more on that game later!), this is much simpler. Piles of evidence are just dumped on you rather than revealed through anything as clever as that game’s brilliant built-in search engine. But it’s still a great little game that makes inspired use of the office setting.
God bless the HR nightmare who helped me identify most of the women on the systems team because he kept hounding them for dates on the workplace chat…. ugh.
Proof that one of gaming’s least-respected genres can be an excellent way to tell a story. It’s a resource-management idle game (stop booing) where you unlock townsfolk and put them to work rifling through the bins, working at the diner, and practising a religion that involves worshipping a giant sloth. You’re rewarded with little nuggets of story that offer more insight into a murder that rocks the town.
Set over several distinct time periods, Asbury Pines smuggles a narrative of surprising scope into a game where all you really do is assign people jobs and then wish they’d hurry the hell up. So its managed to simulate the agonising wait for revelations between episodes of a TV detective drama. Er, good!
Customers come into your horrible little shop with queries like “my neighbour forgot my birthday, got any cursed talismans that’ll ruin her life?” or “I’d like a Munted Leg please! No, I don’t care to offer any details as to what that is”. You then use your almost-helpful books, along with your senses of sight, touch, smell, and general vibes to deduce which antiquity they want. And hand it over to a clearly dangerous individual instead of calling the police.
This sequel is packed with puzzles, like a macabre remake of Professor Layton and the Curious Village, if the professor decided to drown Luke in goat’s blood to make a nifty totem.
Very satisfying to chip away at, even if with each new sale you suspect you’re probably making the world worse. A bit like working for Microsoft.
Posh Cat Studio wanted to make a detective game, but after a few weeks of researching murder, they ended up about as depressed as I was when Netflix suddenly pulled The Rise of the Golden Idol from my subscription. So they decided to take the excellent Golden Idol formula and instead apply it to more mundane mysteries, like ‘who broke my favourite mug?’ or ‘where did my cat wander off to?’
Lovely art and charming presentation make this an easy game to underestimate. But it’s actually got strong sleuthing chops and proves you don’t need high stakes to make a great detective game.
I was thrilled when Inkle gave us a surprise sequel to Overboard!, their excellent push-your-husband-to-his-death-then-try-to-get-away-with-it simulator. I was less thrilled when Expelled apparently didn’t sell nearly as well. Bah! Everyone missed out on the best boarding school adventure since Rockstar bullied potential uni— I mean, since Rockstar’s Bully.
Verity Amersham has been accused of throwing another student out of a window. Now you have to clear her name, solve plenty more schoolyard mysteries, and basically act like a right little scumbag. Go buy a million copies so they can make another one.
You’ve been summoned to Blake Manor to investigate the disappearance of Evelyn Deane. Could something sinister be afoot? Well, on my first morning of investigating I met two people who were planning on killing her before I’d barely even had breakfast, so let’s call that a ‘yes’.
Blake Manor is crammed with suspicious guests who are a delight to irritate. Break into their rooms, rifle through their belongings, then innocently ask why they keep a half-empty vial of poison on their nightstand.
Impeccable presentation perhaps disguises that this is more of a traditional point-and-click than it initially seems. But what kind of detective can’t appreciate a great disguise?
The Roottree sisters have tragically died in a plane crash and it’s up to you to fill out their massive family tree, with all the investigative tools that ’90s dial-up has to offer.
Roottrees is a joyous send-up of the early internet, right down to the horrifying screech your computer makes when you first go ‘online’. You’ll type out those words in the search engine with 100% correct spelling or get nothing at all, bucko.
I’d love a modern-day sequel where you have to use the AI-poisoned bullshit that is search engines now, but I also don’t want to put the developers of one of 2025’s best games through such trauma.
As moaned about briefly earlier, Netflix suddenly pulled this game’s excellent DLC from subscribers halfway through its roadmap. If they successfully buy Warner Bros, we’ll be lucky if the next Arkham game lets you play beyond Bruce Wayne’s parents being shot.
Anyway, the winning Golden Idol formula, wherein you poke around crime scenes for words and phrases then piece together what the Hell happened, reached incredible new heights here.
The highlight is the case set in someone’s brain that’s under attack. That screenshot above is their subconscious, complete with spinning balloon face screaming “I am a FOOL!” (instantly the series’ most relatable character). Developer Color Gray Games is clearly at the height of its powers. Can we pass some sort of law forcing it to make these wonderful games forever?
This itch.io game (ridiculously, completely free) sees you accessing the hard drive of a detective who apparently solved a murder, only for their computer to mysteriously be locked away by their superiors. Unfortunately the computer has no images, an inbox with only one message, and four short conversation transcripts. Oh, and the fourth transcript is actually missing half the title, so you can’t access it until you figure out what that was and type it in. Good luck!
Text adventures died out decades ago because of how little entertainment value there was in typing out a long theory only to be told ‘I don’t understand’. But Type Help knows that when you do type a correct deduction into its bloody computer, it feels better than winning the lottery on the same day all your childhood bullies get diagnosed with terminal illnesses.
You’ll endure that deliberately-frustrating interface for both the rush of those deductions and to get more of its gripping story that would be an all-time great detective yarn in any medium. Fingers crossed the upcoming remake can retain the stripped-back magic of 2025’s finest detective game.