Mermaid Mask Review – the funnest underwater murder mystery you’ll ever play | Sports

Meit’s a boom time for mystery games, the Detective Grimoire series is notable for its style and humor. The Mermaid Mask continues to build on the design laid out in the Secret of the Swamp and polished in the Tangle Tower, and while there is room for improvement this process is worth the seven-year wait.

This time, Grimoire’s skillful and intelligent Sally is called to the ship to solve the murder of its captain, Magnus Mortuga. You click around the crowded rooms of the ship to hear the funny comments of the explorers and look for clues and – very close – click and drag to move things around for further research or to solve a puzzle. (For those who are playing Nintendo Switch 2(Mouse controls are useful here, if they don’t improve over time.)

The puzzles aren’t so heavy as to disrupt the flow: variations on “changing these things to meet more or less clear rules” are stylistically sticky. Your reward is usually an open door and something new to explore, which – most importantly – you can offer to the skeptics.

And here is the center of the game: voice chat with different characters. I immediately turned the music down (which sadly does not compare to the Tangle Tower soundtrack) to enjoy the well-executed dialogue. Some of the suspects are more memorable than others, but the supernatural setting (and the game is all in the same world) allows for archetypes not found anywhere else.

Madam Tadpole is bright, green-skinned, and appears to have a gut. Mariana Moon is an old woman who has a natural sense of smell and her voice is slurred when she chews on her pipe. Godric Gripp is an anthropomorphised cane-wielding compass repairman named Cornelius Cane, whose introduction has an inevitable shop-shop look that the producers must have written for one laugh only.

These iconic moments are one of the best visual additions since Tangle Tower, i.e. 3D animations of the memories. But when it comes to solving the mysteries, they don’t fix what isn’t broken: like in Tangle Tower, and other puzzle games like the Golden Idol series and The Séance of Blake Manor, you create puzzles by filling in scrolls of sentences from selected nouns and verbs.

The whole process is well-organized: your calculation shows empty slots for things you haven’t found yet, every topic spoken by a suspect gets a satisfactory certificate, and Grimoire and Sally inform you when you reveal the secret of each suspect (once I encountered an error when the players were already unlocked, but the players who were already unlocked before).

Some players may find this last option to be a creative option, especially if they lose what they currently have and start hunting for pixels to find the rest. And the flow fails in the last chapter, where the game gives you a real list to check before building each character’s obstacles and charging to the end. But while The Mermaid Mask’s ending feels more satisfying than Tangle Tower’s, the game is more about the twists and turns and laughs you have along the way.