A submarine full of secrets … The Mermaid Mask.
Photograph: SFB Games Review The Mermaid Mask review – the funniest underwater murder mystery you can play PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PS5; SFB GamesDetective Grimoire is at it again in the long-awaited new entry to this stylish series of comedy whodunnits In a boom time for mystery games, the Detective Grimoire series stands out for its style and sense of humour.
The Mermaid Mask continues to build upon the formula laid down in Secret of the Swamp and polished in Tangle Tower, and while there is still room for further improvements this sequel is worth the seven years’ wait.
This time, the casually competent Grimoire and his smart if sarcastic sidekick Sally have been summoned to a submarine to solve the locked-room murder of its captain, Magnus Mortuga.
You click around the cluttered rooms of the vessel to hear the detectives’ comedic commentary and look for clues and – closer up – click and drag to move objects around for further examination or to solve a puzzle. (For those playing on Nintendo Switch 2, the mouse controls are actually useful here, if not comfortable in the long run.) Never too taxing … The Mermaid Mask.
Photograph: SFB Games Puzzles are never so taxing as to disrupt the flow: variations on “arrange these objects to satisfy some more-or-less apparent rules of logic” with stylistic wrapping.
Your reward is generally an opened door and a new object to examine, which – importantly – you can then present to the various suspects.
And here is the chewy centre of these games: the fully voice-acted conversations with a cast of colourful characters.
I immediately lowered the volume of the music (which sadly doesn’t compare to Tangle Tower’s characterful soundtrack) to better hear the well-performed dialogue.
Some of the suspects are more memorable than others, but the somewhat supernatural backdrop (and these games are all set in very much the same world) allows for archetypes not found elsewhere.
Colourful characters … The Mermaid Mask.
Mariana Moon is an older woman with an unnaturally keen sense of smell whose voice acting is cleverly muffled when she’s chewing on her pipe.
Godric Gripp is a compass repairman with an anthropomorphised stick called Cornelius Cane, whose introduction involves an unavoidable shopfront interface the developers must have coded purely for this one laugh.
These stylish moments are one of the more noticeable additions since Tangle Tower, with, for example, new 3D animations to illustrate the suspects’ recollections.
But when it comes to solving the mysteries, they haven’t fixed what isn’t broken: as in Tangle Tower, and other deduction games such as the Golden Idol series and The Séance of Blake Manor, you form hypotheses by filling sentence blanks from a selection of nouns and verbs.
The overall process is soothingly methodical: your inventory shows blank slots for objects you’ve yet to find, each topic addressed with a suspect gets a satisfying tick, and Grimoire and Sally inform you when you’ve uncovered enough to tackle each suspect’s individual mystery (in one instance I did experience a bug where this unlocked prematurely, but the developers are already fixing bugs raised by early players).
Some players may find this completion percentage approach too formulaic, especially if they exhaust their current inventory and resort to pixel hunting to locate the rest.
And the pacing does falter in the final chapter, where the game presents you with a more literal checklist to work through before you get to tie up each character’s loose ends and make your final accusation.
But while the conclusion of The Mermaid Mask feels far more satisfying than that of Tangle Tower, these games are far more about the twisty journey and the laughs you have along the way.
The Mermaid Mask is out now; £17.75 Explore more on these topicsGames PC Nintendo Switch Nintendo Switch 2 PlayStation 5 Nintendo reviews Share Reuse this content
