Making mystery games is hard enough. Convincing anyone to play them is its own kind of challenge.

Most video games are sold on the moment-to-moment action. The store page advertises what you do as the player interacting within a system. What you do in the first ten minutes isn’t that different from what you’re doing after the first ten hours, so it’s easy enough for players to judge the quality of a potential purchase from a demo, trailer, or screenshots alone.

But mystery games are sold on a promise: the puzzles will be solvable, the twists will be surprising, and the answers will be satisfying. And that promise can’t be fulfilled without the audience themselves investing a substantial amount of time and effort.

Nobody wants to play through a game all the way to the end, only to find out that the final twist ruins the whole experience that came before it. Mystery games are expected to have twists, but a twist done poorly is often worse than no twist at all. So attempting a successful implementation of the genre runs the risk of actually creating a failed one.

Most people won’t bother putting in the effort to try out a new game — not because they’re lazy, but because they’re rightfully risk-averse. Waiting for someone else to take on the risk is a completely rational decision. Someone else can buy the game, play it to the end, and write a review. And then, if there’s enough positive reviews, the game is actually worth taking a chance on.

When we look at the most popular mystery games, it’s easy to see a pattern: their authors have name-brand recognition. The author has built up such a strong reputation of trust, that their fans will excitedly buy whatever game they put out next, simply because their name is attached to the project.

Name-brand recognition isn’t a problem; again, it’s the market functioning rationally. Creators who fulfill their promises tend to inspire future confidence. If they did a good job once, they’ll probably do a good job a second time. And if they do a good job a second time, they’ll probably do a good job a third time, too.

What I’ve just described is the shape of a career, not just a one-hit wonder. Each game release gives the next one higher odds of success, because you’re starting from a better position each time. Fans from your previous games will return to purchase the next one — but more importantly, your public reputation as a developer will attract new attention.

And sure, there are countless non-mystery games that deliver sales from name-brand recognition alone. But the trust itself is not nearly as critical, because it’s immediately obvious through gameplay videos and streams how the game actually plays, and that’s what most customers are evaluating when they decide whether to make a purchase.

Demos are usually just as effective for most games, because the player has an opportunity to try a “free sample” of the full game. But great mystery game demos shouldn’t actually reveal the ending. So even if a demo begins with some intriguing questions and continues through with fun gameplay — if the story doesn’t hold up by the end, it can ruin all the fun that came before it. When that happens, the player feels disappointed at best, and outright tricked at worst.

Other genres of games do have similar problems, but they’re all visibly front-loaded rather than something that can only be judged at the very end. For example, platformers need tight controls and smooth physics, and players easily find out early on whether or not any particular platformer has those features. Whenever a game claims to be in a genre, it can usually be determined within the span of a free demo whether or not the game actually contains what it’s advertising. Tight controls and smooth physics are a promise to the player, and that promise can be fulfilled within that free sample. But the promise of a great mystery is something that can only be fulfilled by making it all the way to the end.

Credibility signals for mystery books

Mystery books have largely solved this problem already. Various signals of credibility have taken shape throughout the industry over the past two centuries. Whether or not mystery games need to follow exactly the same formula, I’m not quite sure — but it’s worth looking to see what’s already been done, and take advantage of what’s known to work.

• Name-brand recognition is the most obvious signal. You’re much more willing to read an Agatha Christie novel than the novel of some random author, because Christie built up a reputation for writing excellent books. The book series itself doesn’t really matter — whether it’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot or a totally different cast, you know the author behind the story is talented, and that you can trust her to deliver an exciting and interesting mystery.

• Recommendations are another signal. Even if you haven’t personally read the novel, you’ve seen the reviews of people who have. Some might be professional critics, previous customers, or just people whose opinion you greatly trust. The point is that their trust acts as a proxy for your own, and so if enough trustworthy people give this novel their recommendation, then it must actually be worth reading.

• Competitive wins are a third signal. Awards are distinct from recommendations, because winning an award means competing against other potential winners. The work isn’t judged in isolation; it’s judged against a pool of competitive peers, and often by experts of the genre. When mystery authors win awards or other kinds of competitions, they obtain a highly valuable signal that can be used to instantly convince people that their work is actually worth reading.

• Discoverability is a fourth signal. When you go shopping at a bookstore, you’re seeing the selection of books that the store itself deemed worthy of putting out onto its shelves. Many of those books were placed there because the stores trust their publishers, which means the real test is getting publishers to trust you instead of directly appealing to readers. Publishers only want to sign on books that are going to sell, and so the more proof you have that your books are capable of selling (whether independently or through competitive wins) then you have higher odds of getting picked up by a publisher, and thus higher odds of ending up among the scarce shelves of a real, physical bookstore. Online bookstores have their own algorithms that determine discoverability.

As you might be able to see from these four signals alone, there is a lot that we can learn from the way mystery authors convey trust to their potential readers. Games have name-brand recognition and public recommendations. Competitive jams, game awards, and showcases with limited space do exist, and every game distributor has its own algorithms for matching relevant games to potential customers.

But here’s the difference. You don’t actually need a publisher to have even modest success selling a video game, nor do you need to win any awards. These are credibility signals from an industry that historically had gatekeepers running the show, but most games these days are distributed on platforms with limited to no gatekeeping whatsoever. And to be clear, I think developers having that level of freedom is actually a good thing, but that freedom clearly comes at a cost.

That only leaves name-brand recognition and recommendations as credibility mechanisms, both of which require customers to directly choose your game over someone else’s and play it all the way through to the end. And that, in turn, leaves us with the cold-start paradox.

To build a reputation, players need to choose your game. But to get players to choose your game, you need to have a reputation.

So, how do you get players to choose your game when you can’t rely on a reputation you don’t yet have?

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Last time, I described the legibility problem currently blocking mystery games from professional viability. So with that in mind, the next question worth asking is: how do we know when this legibility problem has been solved? And the answer to that is the topic of today’s post: what I call star power.

What is star power?

Star power is my term for the cultural recognition of a work or its creator beyond its originally intended domain, especially within mainstream conversation. When a star is born, you know that the category is legible, because people outside of the domain understand it.

The best example of star power in the mystery genre is the iconic character of Sherlock Holmes. When people think of mystery, they think of Sherlock: his pipe, his outfit, his mannerisms, and his quotes. “Elementary, my dear Watson” isn’t even a quote Holmes ever said, but people repeat it anyway because his star power is so strong. Or the more sarcastic phrase “No shit, Sherlock!” has entered common vernacular among so many people, that anyone can understand what it means without having read a single mystery novel.

But star power can apply to creators just as much as works of fiction. Agatha Christie was a mystery author superstar, becoming the best-selling novelist of all-time (including to this day). Modern authors in any genre can have star power too: Stephen King for horror and J.K. Rowling for fantasy. There’s a good chance you recognize their names even if you’ve never read their books (like myself), and that’s exactly what star power means.

With this definition of star power in mind, we can start to think of some video games with large amounts of star power: Pokemon, Minecraft, Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, to name a handful. You can mention any of these games to a relative during Thanksgiving dinner, and almost certainly they’ll know what you’re talking about, even if they don’t play video games. In fact, you’ll probably find brand images from some of these games on graphic tees, boxes of cereal, and packs of soda the next time you go shopping. Generally speaking, you can measure a brand’s star power from any real-world presence outside of its original context.

Star power has no relation to popularity within its primary domain. Factorio is a well-made and highly popular game on Steam — one of my personal favorites — yet if you asked a random person on the street if they’ve heard of Factorio, they’ll almost certainly tell you no. Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi are well-known and highly respected names among mystery gamers, but if you ask who they are the average person will fail to recognize them. The same is true for many more creators of seemingly popular mystery games: they are very much known within the domain of mystery gamers, but not well-known at all within mainstream culture.

One exception can be seen in the case of Among Us, a social deduction game released by Innersloth in 2018. The game had initially been considered a flop, and the developer had already moved on. But it suddenly saw success in 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns. Streamers picked it up, and their audiences followed. It made the social deduction genre legible to the mainstream: the little bean-shaped astronauts became recognizable characters, “sus” entered common slang, and aspects of the game embedded themselves inside broader Internet culture. But once lockdowns lifted and social patterns normalized, engagement sharply declined. According to SteamDB, the game had peaked at 447,000 concurrent players in September 2020, dropped to 132,000 concurrent players in March 2021, and has struggled ever since to reclaim the 26,000 concurrent players it had in November of that same year.

So, Among Us had briefly achieved star power status, only to lose it as quickly as it had been found. It’s still a game that did very well and certainly achieved success by any definition, but it’s a contrast to the previously mentioned games with star power status. Pokemon, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and so on are all franchises that have typically had steady growth over the years through repeated entries and expansions, while Among Us declined rapidly, and its attempted spinoffs have not done nearly as well as the original game. The lesson is that external conditions can produce star power, but cannot sustain it. In that case, what can?

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Happy Mystery Monday!

The previous post introduced the problem of turning mystery game development from a hobby into a profession. In this post, I’d like to clarify a few details, while also introducing my best attempt at a solution.

What does it mean to be a professional?

I hadn’t actually thought of the term “professional” until recently when working on some future content for Mystery Academy. I’ve previously used the term “business mindset” to describe the kind of developer who wants to go beyond making games as a hobby, or even the phrase “full-time developer” — but the word “professional” is significantly better all around.

A professional is someone who earns a living from their craft. But this definition isn’t sufficient to truly grasp what it means to be one:

• Professionals have standard tools of the trade.

• Professionals have formal education and training.

• Professionals have mentorship and guidance from experts.

• Professionals have credentialing mechanisms (licensing, awards, etc.).

• Professionals have associations and networking groups.

So, a better definition is: A profession is a full-time occupation supported by dedicated infrastructure for the work, including tools that practitioners share, education that transmits accumulated knowledge, mentorship that guides individuals through development, credentials that demonstrate skill, and associations that keep practitioners in dialogue with each other.

Trying to earn a full-time living when the professional infrastructure doesn’t exist is like trying to win the lottery. Every new product is a dice-roll that might perform better (or worse) than the last one. So the point of the infrastructure is to transform any “lucky streak” into a repeatable process that others can follow with reasonable expectations: if your craft meets a high enough standard, and aligns with what the market demands, then commercial success should follow.

Of course, professional infrastructure doesn’t guarantee success for anyone. Mystery novels have had it for over a century, and most authors still struggle to earn a living from their work. But the point is that authors who fail at least have a path they were following — a path they know how to iterate on, that others have walked on before them, and whose failures can be diagnosed and learned from. Without infrastructure, there’s no path. Every attempt is a fresh dice roll, and no one can tell you why yours came up short.

What mystery games do differently

If I wanted to write an article on how to become a professional mystery novelist, it would look something like: learn the craft, query an agent, hire editors, sign with a publisher, send out review copies, launch the book. Even video games in general have a similar pathway: learn the craft, pitch to publishers, send keys to streamers, launch the game. But mystery games struggle with the latter approach:

• Mystery isn’t a category for game publishers like mystery is for book publishers

• Mystery games aren’t ideal for streaming due to their limited replayability and the lack of incentive for viewers to purchase the game after watching a playthrough

• Lessons on mystery craft are almost all aimed at novelists, and lessons on game development aren’t aimed at mystery designers whatsoever

These three problems are the reasons why, I believe, mystery games have yet to produce a viable professional path.

We have often seen big mystery game hits come and go unpredictably — and often games are made in response, trying to ride the trend and capture some of that success afterwards. But long-term, this strategy is not sustainable.

So, in this article I’d like to propose solutions to each of these three points in detail.

Product Legibility

Products must be legible to consumers — that is, what the seller offers must match what the buyer seeks out.

Historically, even mystery novels were not legible products. When Poe invented the genre, he called his story “a tale of ratiocination” — a term nobody uses now and few even used back then. Despite his literary achievements, he died in poverty.

Decades later, Doyle framed his Sherlock Holmes stories not as mystery stories, but as adventure stories — a dominant genre of the time period. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes presented a new form in a familiar frame, which allowed the detective story to achieve mainstream popularity at the time, and for Sherlock Holmes to remain a household name and mascot of the mystery genre even today.

Once the detective story became a popular genre, emerging authors began to take the craft more seriously as its own unique art form. By the 1930s the detective story was in its Golden Age, the most notable author being Agatha Christie. She had subverted the tropes that Poe had invented and that Doyle had refined, and in doing so she became the best-selling novelist of all-time, regardless of genre, even to this day.

In mystery video games, we have yet to produce any developers with equivalent “star power”, and there’s a simple but overlooked explanation as to why.

Mystery games have historically advertised themselves as adventure games, which seems very similar to the Sherlock Holmes stories calling themselves adventure stories. And yet these games have failed to replicate the mainstream popularity that Sherlock Holmes had achieved — even when some of these games are literally adaptations of those same Sherlock Holmes stories.

Here’s the problem: video games are known and classified by their gameplay, not by their story. When consumers go shopping, they search storefronts by gameplay genre. The “adventure game” genre has always had a murky definition, with it essentially being a catch-all term for story-first games. Rebranding mystery games as adventure games just shoves mystery into a smaller box that it can’t actually escape.

The correct approach would be to target a massively popular or trending gameplay genre, such as simulation games, roguelike deck-builders, first-person shooters, and so on. Look at the indie hit Vampire Survivors, which within five years birthed its own genre (“bullet heaven”) which has already gained a tag on Steam to let users find more of that kind of game. I’ve already written numerous times in other posts about how to blend mystery in with these more popular genres.

Currently, tags on Steam only exacerbate the mystery game legibility problem. All three of the relevant tags — mystery, detective, and investigation — logically point to the same kind of game: a game where a detective investigates a mystery. The “investigation” tag is the only one that describes the mystery gameplay loop; the other two describe aesthetics or story, and they're the two more popular tags.

So until we have our “Sherlock Holmes moment”, mystery games won’t be legible as a product category to consumers. And if they’re not legible to consumers, video game publishers (just like book publishers pre-Doyle) won’t want to fund them, which makes it harder to get the funding necessary to operate as a professional.

(The multiplayer game Among Us might be the closest we’ve come to embedding mystery games in mainstream popular culture — but its influence only shed light on the social deduction genre rather than mystery as a whole.)

Native Commerce

Publishing books has always had a real cost, which means that a price-tag has to be baked into the product. Anyone publishing a mystery novel has to engage in commerce.

But the same is not true for video games. Different platforms have different rules.

Steam enforces professionalism through a $100 submission fee per game. It’s not perfect, but whatever spam does arrive, it arrives with a price point and with the intent of making money. This filter inherently favors consumers over producers.

Meanwhile, itch has zero gatekeeping: uploads are free, and no quality standards are enforced — which benefits producers over consumers. The natural consequence is that the consumers (that is, paying customers) leave the platform, and you end up with a producer-to-producer platform (because anyone on the platform can be a producer).

Now that said, a producer-to-producer platform does have certain benefits. It allows novice developers to get feedback on their games, improve their skills, meet potential team members, and gain credentials through ranking highly in competitions. These are all great and worthwhile things — but once you intend to operate professionally, these things can easily become a hinderance to professional success.

Developing a product for any user is vastly different than developing a product for a paying customer. Users who obtain things for free tend to expect more things for free later on. So the price of your current product sets a reference point for your next one.

Free products teach your audience to expect a price-tag of zero, and so any future release has two outcomes:

• Releasing another free product prevents commercial activity from ever starting.

• Releasing a paid product loses a majority (or all) of your existing audience.

(And you can trust me on this one, because I’ve lived through both scenarios.)

More importantly, the feedback you receive from free users often isn’t the right kind of feedback, precisely because the feedback cost them nothing to send you. Feedback from paying users is aligned with commercial incentives, and that’s what actually teaches you what you need to do in order to operate as a professional.

Now relating to mystery specifically, we can see that platforms like Amazon for books, Netflix for movies, YouTube for videos, and Spotify for podcasts all have built-in commerce in mostly producer-to-consumer platforms. It’s not impossible for a consumer of content to start their own YouTube channel or Spotify podcast, but the platforms themselves are algorithmically designed for consumers, not producers.

So when we look again at gaming platforms, we immediately notice the difference. Itch is too different to be viable. Steam might be viable if mystery becomes legible. There might even be potential on mobile or console platforms, or even the native web browser. The average mystery reader won’t use Steam, but might open a web page or app on their phone to play a mystery game.

But mystery is already legible on other platforms, in other mediums, precisely because it’s been culturally understood to be a kind of story rather than a kind of game.

And ironically, that’s the exact opposite of what the great authors of mystery knew to be true. Poe compared mystery to tabletop and card games, and a century later Van Dine (who knew that games must have rules) made a board game adaptation of his own detective series.

Mystery has always been gameplay-first, but it was forced to be compressed into story-first mediums. Now that we’ve finally built a gameplay-first medium, we’re importing the compressed version of mystery back into it. It’s like seeing a sculpture, drawing a sketch of it, and then 3D-printing the sketch. We’ve lost an entire dimension of the art form.

So, mystery has thrived commercially in story-first mediums, but it’s failed to live up to its commercial potential in gameplay-first mediums because of this lost dimension.

Again, you can point to Among Us as succeeding on this front — it’s a game in the truest sense of having rules and systems that multiple players engage in. But don’t mislead yourself into thinking that social deduction games are the only viable option.

Iteration Velocity

Having a legible product category and natively commercial infrastructure are both the prerequisites for iteration velocity. That’s because legibility produces frameworks of understanding that can be turned into both education and tools, and commerce produces sustainability that lets you try again. And once you have those, you end up with a repeatable process that gets faster every time you use it.

You can see the parallels again in history. Before Poe, there was maybe one detective-shaped story every 100 years or so. After Poe, it took nearly 50 years before Doyle popularized the genre, and then 30 years for it to reach its peak in the Golden Age. So the mysteries kept getting better, and they kept getting better at faster rates.

That’s what it looks like to turn a craft into a profession. It went from a solo innovator who died in poverty, to a fully formed Detection Club where authors worked together and iterated on their ideas to produce the best works in the history of the genre.

Through my interviews with developers, I’ve observed that the average mystery game (that intends to achieve a professional quality) tends to take around two or three years. Some games even take longer than five years, and they typically suffer for it. Meanwhile, there have been exceptions to the rule: some developers have managed to create a series of games, with each game taking roughly one year or less, ranging from modest to lucrative financial success.

The difference in these approaches is simple: story-first vs. gameplay-first, yet again.

Developers who approach their games story-first are essentially making a mystery novel with extra steps: more than one path through, with high-fidelity art and music. Every piece of the game is deliberately handcrafted to excruciating detail, and as a result not only does it take a long time to produce, but much of the work can’t be reused for more than one game.

On the other hand, developers who take a gameplay-first approach have greater iteration velocity. They’re able to reuse the systems they’ve designed to quickly scaffold their programming, while at the same time letting those systems operate to create emergent gameplay. The reason why this works is that the developer creates systems that produce more output than it takes to build them. So the effort scales exponentially, rather than linearly as it does for story-first games.

Iteration velocity is necessary in order to find what works and discard what doesn’t. But more importantly, it enables spending time on the most valuable parts of a given project. You can begin the next project with a head-start from the old one, and to some extent players will even appreciate this, because they enjoyed the existing systems and want to see them used again.

The whole point of shipping faster isn't to ship just anything, but to ship competitive products. If you can get the basics up and running much faster, then you can focus more on the creativity, the quality, and the polish that enables a product that customers actually want to purchase.

None of that happens in a single game, and none of it happens alone. Discovering a gameplay-first architecture for mystery is going to take many games, many developers, and many attempts. As it happened the same way the mystery novel's form was first discovered, we too will need iteration velocity to rediscover the long-lost dimension to the art form.

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Conclusion

These are the three problems I've been attempting to solve for at least the past three years. And the framework presented in this essay is my attempt to articulate why they all matter.

Now recall the list of professional infrastructure I brought up at the beginning. It turns out that, in pursuit of the solutions to these problems, I’ve ended up building at least one piece of infrastructure that serves each purpose.

The Mystery Gamedev Discord served the role of an association or group, where developers can iterate on ideas with each other. Mystery Academy was built to formalize the process, and Mystery Maker was a set of tools built to automate it. I’ve also offered mentorship sessions and hosted multiple recurring Mystery Game Jams, which provide credentials for aspiring developers.

With all these put together, they form the backbone of the professional infrastructure that mystery game developers have always been missing.

None of this is finished, and none of it has reached its full potential. But every piece is a step toward making mystery legible again in the way its inventors always understood it to be: a game, expressed in the medium that was finally built to hold it.

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Happy Mystery Monday!

It’s been three whole years since I started Mystery Gamedev, and during this time I’ve learned far more about mystery games than I ever thought was possible. I’ve researched the history of the craft, analyzed the mysteries that stood the test of time, and engineered a teachable process that was used to create Mystery Maker.

However, learning the craft is only half the battle. The other half is execution.

And there’s nowhere that could be more obviously seen than in the most recent Steam Next Fest, which showcased over 150 mystery game demos for the small timeframe of only seven days.

From the standpoint of a consumer, Next Fest seems pretty awesome, because there are so many mystery games to choose from. But from the standpoint of a developer, Next Fest has produced an obvious question: how do you stand out among all this competition?

Ironically, this is the very same question that I was wondering when I started Mystery Gamedev three years ago, when Next Fests were a novelty as opposed to a tradition. I wanted to understand what I could do to get my mystery game as many wishlists as possible, which in theory shouldn’t be hard because mysteries are such a popular genre in other media. But now, I’m fairly confident I’ve arrived at the answer.

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Mysteries are a game, not a genre

First, we have to understand that video games are usually categorized by their game mechanics rather than their story genre, which isn’t true for books or film. People play games to experience their unique methods of interactivity, and so categorizing games based on those mechanics is the most efficient way to help customers find a game they want to purchase and will enjoy playing. Because other media are one-way, they can only be organized by the kind of story being told to the audience, not by the way the audience interacts with its system.

And thus, mystery fans have historically struggled to find mystery games to play. Games are described as platformers, shooters, role-playing games, and so on. But they’re not often described as mystery games. Even when a game is described as a detective game, it’s usually because the player’s avatar is dressed like a stereotypical detective and the story revolves around some kind of crime being solved.

But that definition of mystery game is far too narrow, bordering on parody. When we describe mystery games in relation to their game mechanics, we can actually start to speak the language of video game consumers, and we not only can gain their attention, but also their respect.

As I’ve written about many times before, a mystery game is a game where the story is a puzzle. And the mystery game loop consists of a three-step cycle: discovering clues, deducing inferences, and deciding which actions to take next. It’s a system designed for the player to piece together the story by their own skill and effort.

So, once we think of mystery games in terms of their mechanics, it becomes significantly easier to classify them, which in turn makes it easier to show players the kinds of mystery games they actually want to play.

Understanding mystery games in terms of the mystery game loop also makes them significantly easier to design. You can start to pull from established templates, mixing and matching different mechanics in new and interesting ways. This is what I mean by learning the craft, but it’s really only the prerequisite to working as a professional.

What it really means to be professional

For me personally, my childhood ambition was always to make video games professionally. I’d make a game, sell it, and earn enough money to live comfortably while proceeding to make the next game.

Now as it just so happens, I’ve learned that I naturally gravitate toward the niche of mystery games, and so the question on my mind naturally becomes: how do I make mystery games professionally?

The answer to that question is not one that I can summarize in just one article. But what I can say is that it’s a fundamentally different set of priorities than operating as a hobbyist. The hobbyist places emphasis on the process, while the professional places emphasis on the result.

My game Detective Butler was a visual novel, and I could have easily made it a regular novel instead. But I liked the fact that visual novels were essentially low-budget animated films, and for my story I really wanted visuals and sounds to go with it.

But, had I chosen to do that, I wouldn’t have been able to release my game for free.

Let’s think about what that actually means. If you publish any kind of novel, it’s just not possible to release the novel for free. That’s because it costs money to manufacture the physical pages of each book, and it costs money to distribute each copy into stores or to ship each copy directly to its buyer. So, even if you managed to write the novel entirely without paying anyone for help, the person involved at the final step of the process is incurring some kind of cost, which has to be offset by the buyer, which is why there is a price for the book.

So, getting paid for your work is the industry default for a mystery novel. And because getting paid is the default, any service or tool that is offered which asks for a payment can always be justified. You pay editors to make your book better, and the cost is justified by the sale of the book at the end. You pay for tools to speed up and improve the development of the book, and again the cost is always justified by the sale of the book at the end.

If we look at the membership requirements for the Mystery Writers of America, one requirement (in addition to paying $115/year) is having received a sufficient amount of payment for your work. It does not matter how “good” the work supposedly is — in fact, it seems the implication here is that the work is deemed to be good based on how much money it ended up making. And I would actually agree with that assessment, even as someone who released a novel-length mystery video game for free. Money acts as a filter, and so even if the mystery is good on a craft level, it may not be good on a professional one, unless some amount of money has changed hands.

There is just no scenario where you can give away a mystery novel for free and still be taken seriously by the industry. Even digital e-books have prices on stores, and if you publish your novel serially, you’re just getting paid by the publication rather than the reader. All that matters is that you were paid for your work.

Now curiously, the Mystery Writers of America does not explicitly list “video game” as a type of mystery that they accept for membership. So, even if I had been paid for my work, I still wouldn’t qualify. Maybe their website hasn’t been updated in a while, or maybe they’re just old-fashioned and don’t really pay attention to video games — both innocent mistakes that can be easily corrected. Or maybe, the blunt truth is that mystery video games currently lack a seriousness worthy of recognition by any institution.

That third interpretation is, sadly, the one I am currently the most willing to believe. My evidence for it is as I’ve already stated: mystery isn’t widely perceived as a game genre in the first place, and the default mode of indie game development has zero financial barriers. The combination of these together forms a death sentence for any attempt at being taken seriously as an industry.

How marketplaces produce professionals

We can see this death sentence play out in all its glory on the itch.io storefront. If you take a few seconds to mess around with their filters, you’ll find that 97% of games on itch are free. Contrast that to Steam, in which 87% of games have a price-tag, and a significant number of its free games have some other kind of monetization built-in.

The conclusion: when you post a game on itch, you’re showing your game to people who are expecting something free, and are disappointed when it’s not. When you post a game on Steam, you’re showing it to people who are willing to pay, but only if your game meets their standards.

In other words: free games are worth playing if they exist at all. Commercial games are only worth playing if they remain competitive with other commercial games.

And so, we end up with two distinct sets of game developers: hobbyists and professionals.

The hobbyist is satisfied to have made the game at all. It is the attention of others that they desire. In order to get that attention, they make their game free, so that as many people as possible can play it.

The professional is only satisfied if the game meets the standards of the consumers in the market. A price is attached to the game not only to justify the cost of making it, but to also run the test of whether or not the game actually meets or exceeds those standards.

Now to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a hobbyist. But if you’re trying to be a professional, and you aren’t happy with your results, then you have to understand that operating like a hobbyist will prevent you from getting very far. And if an industry only exists because it’s composed of professionals, then the only way a mystery game industry can exist is if a substantial amount of mystery game developers move beyond the level of hobbyist and into the realm of professional.

And so, this is where I’d like to see the mystery game industry evolve. The video game industry already exists, and already has professional infrastructure: tool-makers, publishers, distributors, and other stakeholders that have standards and regulations to comply with in order to match our products with a sufficiently large number of potential customers.

You can still be an indie gamedev while operating as a professional. It’s not a contradiction. But it does require a different mindset from what a large number of fledgling indie devs tend to have: you need to be willing to bear the cost of it.

What it takes to build an industry

And now we come full circle. The games that I saw in this recent Steam Next Fest were of, in my opinion, largely professional quality. Firstly because they were on Steam at all, which charges a $100 fee per game, and then also that they took the time to enter Next Fest and prepare a demo. Beyond that, they had their mystery game loops clearly articulated both in their page copy and their trailers, and their capsule images and screenshots were clearly professionally made.

But my point goes deeper than just “do high quality work.” My point is that quality comes at a cost, and that historically much of the ecosystem of the video game industry (storefronts, game engines, educational videos, community memberships, and so on) has been designed to insulate aspiring developers from any costs at all.

Mystery novelists have an industry of professionals who are either making enough money to live comfortably, or at the very least, consider it an aspirational goal. They are willing to invest in developmental editors, proofreaders, conventions, and consultants to make their mysteries competitive rather than just “good enough to ship,” because they have seen enough evidence to believe that competitive mysteries produce better returns on investment.

By contrast, many gamedevs have pessimistically given up on their dreams, and I was nearly one of them. Like them, I recognized the problem — but instead of giving up, I pivoted to building tools and organizing a community to make better infrastructure. I’ve delayed working on my own games for three years in order to attempt solving this problem from a new perspective (though I’ll come back to them soon). And for all I know, it might take three more years to actually come close to getting there.

Real observations from the industry

And finally, I’d like to share some specific observations I made about the games shown during Next Fest. Out of the 150 mystery games, only about 20 of them actually made it onto my wishlist. That’s not a sign of unprofessionalism from the other 130, but just the actual reality of what happens when customers go shopping. Customers have budgets and need to prioritize which games are actually worth playing, so you have to do your absolute best to be in your audience’s top twenty games.

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Last week wrapped up the 2026 Mystery Game Jam, our third annual event where participants must create their own mystery-themed video game in just 30 days.

The theme for this year was Running Out of Time, and I think all of us really felt it — both as the entrants were making their games, and as the judges were playing through them!

The Winners

You can watch the full 1-hour awards show here, or you can keep reading for the short version.

The prize winners were determined by our panel of three judges, plus a separate prize determined solely by the general public. The prize itself was our new creative tool, Mystery Maker.

Aside from the prize winners, some honorable mentions include:

• The Rivergrove Files

• Liana’s Loop

• Undead Interrogation

• Train Detective

• Marrow’s Edge

• Ultimatum

These were games that scored very highly among the judges, but didn’t quite make it into the top three.

Overall, there were many excellent entries even beyond the ones listed above. And as I’ve said many times before, the real prize is having had the experience, so hopefully you all had fun and learned some lessons that you can take with you into the future.

3rd Place - An Overgrown Mystery

An investigator must uncover who caused wild apple trees to suddenly surround her city.

This game was one of the first entries I decided to play — it caught my attention with its colorful art style, and it kept me hooked through the whole thing from start to finish. The note-comparing mechanic was innovative (I’ve never seen anything like it), the battle sections were genuine puzzles, and by the end I felt like I had gone on a fun adventure.

I was also impressed by the fact that not only was this a solo entry, but it appears to be their first game on itch. The author clearly had passion for these characters and their world.

(Also, it was nice to see at least one entry that tackled the “Planted” theme end up in the top three!)

2nd Place - The Yearbook

Investigate a devastating fire at a school reunion by identifying the victims and piecing together what happened through clues hidden in a yearbook.

This game was impressive for doing a lot with very little. It manages to flesh out a large cast of characters purely from only two sources of information: their high school yearbook and their autopsy reports.

It’s very much modeled after games like Return of the Obra Dinn where you need to identify characters based on how they died, but it does it in its own unique way.

Despite the simplicity of the concept, it took me 2 full hours to solve. And at least for me personally, it was the only entry that genuinely made me ask myself “why didn’t I see that from the beginning?!” once I did figure it out.

1st Place - Loop of Faith

A newly appointed priest on a 19th-century Irish island must interrogate suspects and gather clues to solve a murder before a mysterious force catches up.

This game had the best implementation of the jam theme: when the player runs out of time, they restart the day in a time-loop, but retaining the knowledge they’ve already learned. Even with this advantage, the player can only make the accusation after carrying out a sequence of actions, which still requires a fun level of strategy.

Loop of Faith not only won first place, but also the popular vote among the general public. That’s not easy to do, because the judges’ opinions diverged somewhat from the general public on quite a few entries, so it’s very impressive that it actually won the top spot on both counts.

Overall, the top three each succeeded in their own unique ways. Congratulations to all the winners! I hope they enjoy their prizes.

Again, if you want to check out the games from the jam, you can find them here.

Mystery Design Insights from the Jam

Now, if you’d like to hear some lessons learned from this year’s event that I didn’t cover in the video, then keep reading.

These aren’t just “fun facts”, but rather detailed observations and analysis about how the entire cohort of ~60 games performed.

Topics include:

• The judging criteria that entries struggled with the most

• Why demos scored high for the public and low for judges

• Which game engines are most suited for scoring high

• Whether using AI helps or hurts entries

• How team size impacts outcomes

I really do think there are some lessons to be learned here, whether you’re one of the developers from the jam or someone thinking about getting involved next year.

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Every mystery is a game.

And this isn’t anything new. It’s been the truth of the genre since its inception.

In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe opened The Murders in the Rue Morgue — the first detective story ever written — by comparing the analytical skill involved in mystery-solving to games like chess, checkers, and whist. The murder investigation depicted in the rest of the story is framed as an illustration of that idea.

In one of the later Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle gave us four famous words: “The game is afoot.” He could have described it as a case, an investigation, an adventure, or even just a mystery. But instead, he chose to call it a game.

During the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, author S.S. Van Dine had stopped treating the word as a metaphor. Writing his Twenty Rules, he said it directly: “The detective story is a game. It is more — it is a sporting event.” Games need rules, mysteries are a kind of game, and so mysteries need to have rules too.

And finally, master of the locked room mystery John Dickson Carr titled his defining essay on the mystery genre “The Grandest Game in the World.” So mysteries aren’t just one kind of game — they’re the best kind of game you could choose to play!

These four influential authors were describing the same truth across a century of mystery storytelling: every mystery is, without question, a game.

Even in novel form, mysteries were games. Then came the movies, the live-action roleplays, the board games and card games, and last but not least — you guessed it — the video games! Mysteries have always been games, regardless of the medium.

And so, when video game designers treat their projects like a video game first and a mystery game second, it shouldn’t be surprising when the result turns out bad.

Story structure is not a game loop

The mystery game loop is the most misunderstood aspect of mystery game design. But once you understand it, you can instantly tell the difference between a mystery game that knows what it’s doing and one that only pretends. You’ll effortlessly spot which games are true mystery games — not just in terms of story, but also in terms of gameplay. And of course, you’ll have the knowledge to create a true mystery game yourself.

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Today’s article expands upon some concepts I previously wrote about. If you’re unfamiliar with the two types of mystery solvers and the four layers of mystery depth, then you might want to read through those articles for more context.

In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which defined many tropes and expectations of the mystery genre. Five years later, Poe described how he wrote his famous poem “The Raven” in an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition.”

In that essay, he explained his writing process: he began by identifying the effect he wanted the poem to have on the reader, and then reverse-engineered the cause of that effect. Poe then named and described the three effects he chose from:

• Truth, the satisfaction of the intellect

• Passion, the excitement of the heart

• Beauty, the elevation of the soul

He argued that these three effects are fundamentally in tension with each other. Truth demands precision, and Passion demands homeliness — and both of these counteract what makes Beauty so effective.

This emphasis on cause-and-effect relationships is everywhere in mystery design. You can see it within the stories themselves, of course — but cause-and-effect are also embedded inside the social contract between the author and audience.

People read mystery stories and play mystery games with the intention of experiencing certain emotions: the thrill of overcoming a challenge, the shock of learning what really happened, and the gratification that comes with restoring justice.

These emotions can be summarized as Solvability, Surprise, and Satisfaction — and they map cleanly onto what the two types of mystery solvers tend to prefer:

• Active Solvers seek out Solvability

• Passive Solvers seek out Surprise

• Both types seek out Satisfaction

When you map these emotions onto Poe’s three effects, you get an elegant framework for identifying what makes every mystery so great:

• Solvability is the mind of a mystery. The player had a fair chance at uncovering the truth. The clues were present, the logic was consistent, and the answer was reachable through reasoning rather than guesswork.

• Satisfaction is the heart of a mystery. The destination justified the journey. The mystery answered the questions it raised, resolved what it set in motion, and left the player feeling that the truth was worth finding. It is the heart of a mystery.

• Surprise is the soul of a mystery. The player was genuinely misled before the truth was revealed. The twist recontextualized everything they thought they knew, creating a moment of revelation that transcends ordinary expectation.

So, Poe didn’t just invent the detective story — he described the emotional architecture for building one. And perhaps, given how deeply Poe thought in terms of cause and effect, the detective story was the inevitable consequence of his philosophy.

The Eight Forms of a Mystery Game

Now, using this framework as a mental model, let’s take a look at what happens when a mystery has — or does not have — any of these effects.

We’re going to work through all eight from the ground up: starting with nothing, adding one property at a time, until we arrive at the ideal.

By the time we get there, you’ll understand exactly why a truly great mystery is so hard to build — but also why it’s worth attempting anyway.

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most mystery game developers will never ship a commercial product. Not because they lack talent or ideas, but because they aren’t taking the process seriously enough to make it across the finish line.

I can speak to this personally through at least three different projects: my first Detective Butler game that I released while in college, my second Detective Butler game that stalled for years and I’ve repeatedly had to put on hiatus, and the group project Reaplaced that won multiple awards with less than 30 days of development.

And across the years of running Mystery Gamedev, I’ve noticed certain patterns and behaviors that the most successful developers tend to adopt, while the least successful developers tend to ignore.

It’s the difference between a game that takes several years to develop and sells practically zero copies, and a game that takes much less time yet brings in much more revenue.

In other words, you’re thinking with a business mindset rather than a hobbyist one.

Now to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with making games purely as a hobby.

But if you want to succeed commercially, you cannot treat game development like one.

So if you’re working on a mystery game right now and want to know whether you’ve truly adopted this business mindset, then keep on reading.

I’ll explain to you the three biggest “hobbyist” mistakes I’ve consistently seen developers make — including myself — and how you can overcome them.

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If you’ve ever wondered where a mystery game idea comes from, the answer is going to start with mystery tropes.

What Are Mystery Tropes?

In general, a trope is a narrative device that instantly provides familiarity across stories. Any story element can be a trope, including:

• a character, like an eccentric detective or femme fatale

• a setting, like a private island or countryside manor

• a plot device, like an impossible crime or mysterious time loop

Tropes are patterns that have been used many times — across many different stories — that players instantly recognize them.

As a result, tropes help define your game’s genre, and they set expectations for what kind of story the player is about to experience.

Players see mystery tropes before they see anything else — even before the start of the game. Tropes are plastered all over store pages and promotional materials.

That way, any game’s potential audience knows what kind of story that they’re going to experience before buying it.

Players need the ability to choose between, for example, playing a cozy mystery game versus a noir mystery game. They have very different feels — different moods, atmospheres, and are designed for very different audiences.

A kid-friendly mystery is going to present itself very differently from a gritty, mature mystery story where there’s murder involved, right?

So a good mystery game will use consistent tropes that reflect its intended audience.

And sometimes, if you mix tropes that normally don’t go together, that might be an interesting creative decision.

But you want to carefully use your tropes in a way to target the right people so that they know what they’re getting into and that you deliver something that they actually want to experience.

Mixing and matching tropes

So one of the easiest ways to brainstorm ideas for a mystery is to just combine these tropes in different ways.

It gives you a premise for a story.

So, for example, we can take a retired police officer, stick him in a haunted castle, and he experiences a mysterious time loop.

Or maybe we can have a nosy neighbor go into a country manor and find a last message.

The idea is that the more mysteries that you read or watch or experience, you will come across more and more of these tropes because they’re the same recurring ideas across multiple stories.

And that’s why it’s important to not just create mysteries, but also consume them to a certain extent, right?

You don’t want to consume too much, but you have to consume enough to know what is currently out there, as well as what’s been done before.

The point isn’t to copy, but to have a starting point from which to expand from.

Consume the classics. They’re classics for a reason — they stand the test of time.

If you look at the earliest detective stories — written in the 19th century — they used tropes that are still often employed today:

• Eccentric detective

• Narrator as sidekick

• Locked room mystery

• Incompetent police

• Countryside robbery

And many more.

Then, in the early 20th century, the authors of the Golden Age mystery novels were successful because they had decades of tropes to work with.

They formalized those tropes into sets of rules, while simultaneously breaking those rules by subverting each trope and defying audience expectations.

And so the key to an interesting mystery is not to invent new tropes, but to reuse old tropes in new but interesting ways.

If your story doesn’t adhere to tropes at all, it just ends up being confusing.

But if it relies too much on tropes, then it’s just boring.

So success is when you strike exactly the right balance.

The creators of the most popular mysteries clearly knew this, and deliberately used tropes to their advantage.

And anyone creating a mystery video game has to do the same.

You have to remember that you’re not designing your game in a vacuum.

Your players bring decades of pop culture experience into your game.

They’ve read mystery novels, they’ve watched crime dramas, and they’ve played other popular mystery games.

They already carry dozens of tropes in their heads, and you can’t stop them from thinking about them.

But what you can do, and should do, is use that information to your advantage.

If the player has seen a mystery story with your tropes in it before, then you’ve instantly communicated information to them in a very efficient way.

What makes a mystery idea interesting is not the tropes that it uses specifically, but how it uses those tropes and how it creatively builds upon them.

Making good use of mystery tropes

There are 3 ways to effectively utilize mystery tropes when creating a mystery game.

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Today marks the start of the Steam Detective Fest, an event celebrating detective games that runs until next Monday, January 19th.

During this time, you can find over 1,000 detective-themed games, either on sale or at least showcased in the event, with over 300 free demos to try out.

Yes, there really are over one thousand games in the fest!

When I was just starting out making mystery games 15 years ago, it was hard enough to find even a handful of indie devs making similar kinds of games.

And, admittedly, creating a detective game in the first place served as its own unique selling point.

So now, with such a large number of similar games being made, it’s definitely a lot harder to stand out.

But this isn’t a bad thing — in fact, it’s a sign that things are finally moving in the right direction.

The fact that Steam decided to host its own Detective Fest shows they know that it’s a hot genre with a lot of growing demand.

One glance at the Detective Fest page shows all the big hits that everyone talks about, from classics like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, to indie experiments like Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn, to more recent successes like The Case of the Golden Idol, The Roottrees are Dead, and even Blue Prince.

All of these games are similar, yet also different. They all appeal to essentially the same audience, yet each one is an entirely unique experience.

And so, Steam’s Detective Fest isn’t just another themed sale. It’s a sign that we’re living in a new era of mystery games — not those defined by their story, but those defined by their gameplay.

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Detective Games vs. Mystery Games

First, let’s be clear about what detective games actually are.

All detective games are mystery games, but not all mystery games are detective games.

Think of it in terms of layers.

Surface-level mystery games feature detectives as nothing more than tropes (if they’re in the story at all). But deep-level mystery games turn detective-work into actual gameplay mechanics.

So, mystery games can have a mysterious atmosphere and pose many interesting questions. But if the player isn’t actively deducing the answers, it isn’t a detective game.

This fundamental distinction stems from the fact that games are interactive experiences.

Books and movies are classified in terms of their story genre, but games have always been classified by their gameplay genre — what the player does:

• In a platformer, you jump across platforms

• In a shooter, you shoot in fast-paced combat.

• In a detective game, you make deductions to solve mysteries

So, when a game is described as a detective game, it’s carrying both the narrative connotations of the mystery story-genre, but also the gameplay connotations of actual detective-work.

Look again at the games in Steam Detective Fest, and you’ll now see the core connection. Being a detective isn’t just a surface-level theme, but a deeper gameplay role that the player actively takes on.

Right now, the conditions all exist for detective games to thrive:

• Lower barriers to entry for new developers

• Mainstream genre visibility on store pages and fests

• Clarity about what “detective gameplay” truly means

And these conditions are the perfect storm for an explosion of growth, innovation, and success.

“Detective” as a Marketing Lens

Beyond discounts, demos, and discovery, Detective Fest also plays an important marketing role that benefits developers as much as it does players.

By grouping games under this label, the fest subtly shifts what the word “detective” communicates. It’s not just flavor text. It signals a type of interaction — a promise that the player will be asked to engage mentally, not to simply absorb a story.

And so, as the detective genre become more visible, marketing clarity matters more.

Players know that they’re going to be investigating — the only question that remains to answer is how.

All of these detective games share the same initial idea: that a mystery should be investigated by the player. But it’s up to each individual game to determine specifically how the mystery-solving process occurs.

Over the past two years, I’ve conducted my own investigation into the mystery game genre, and I’ve learned so much about all the different game mechanics that can be used.

There are consistent design patterns that all kinds of mystery games utilize in order to make the player actively take on the role of a detective.

And I’m going to dive deep into all of those mystery game mechanics in upcoming newsletters.

But here’s what you need to know right now: the mystery game landscape is ripe with opportunity. And it’s never been a better time to get involved.

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The Golden Age of Mystery Games

I’m far from the only developer noticing just how many mystery games are being created. We’ve seen hit after hit in recent years, and even more games are taking the (reasonable) approach of trying to clone those hits and achieve their own success.

It’s a popular (and maybe even trendy) genre, and everyone wants to get in on the rush.

But I think we’re still actually very early.

Most people only see the surface-level detective aesthetic. Only some will notice just how many possibilities there are in terms of immersion and gameplay.

If you look at the history of mystery stories, even the earliest authors considered them to be a kind of game. It was always an interactive experience between author and reader, and they did their absolute best with the tools they had (pen and paper).

Now we have computers, and the Internet, and so much more. We can build simulations of worlds that actually allow the player the take actions, discover clues, and come to their own conclusions. We can create highly immersive environments, infinitely replayable content, and non-linear outcomes that branch based on the player’s own detective abilities.

The mystery genre has evolved so much over the past 100 years. And now we can build things that the authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction couldn’t even imagine.

There’s a resurgence of interest in mystery stories, and a newfound appreciation for how players can interact with gameplay systems in order to solve them.

We can’t let this sudden popularity fizzle out.

The last official Steam event for mystery games — Mystery Fest — was three whole years ago. We had no clue for years when there was going to be another mystery-themed fest, and by this time next week we’re going to be in that exact same position.

So, it’s important to grab hold of this momentum, and keep consistent mystery-themed sales and events running year-round.

That’s why I’ve previously hosted the Mystery Game Jam twice already (and will be again this year for a third time). That’s also why I hosted the Cold Case Jam, to actually encourage finishing the mystery games that developers have started.

And that’s why I’m consistently writing newsletters on the topic, creating new tools and resources, and even interviewing successful mystery game developers.

If we want to keep this going, we need to work on it together.

How We Can Keep Momentum Strong

And so, I’m announcing — alongside my already busy schedule — the intent to create our own mystery-themed Steam event. To be clear, there is a strict process that I need to follow in order to make it happen, and it’s not entirely within my control, so I can’t guarantee that it actually will.

But in the next few days, I’m going to start asking the developers in our Discord server if they would like to take part. And if there is enough interest, then we’ll have our own event on Steam sometime later this year.

What will set our event apart is the focus on indie devs who have been passionate about the genre, but haven’t had traditional means for marketing their games.

Unsurprisingly — like I said at the start of this article — the Detective Fest page is plastered with the biggest hits on the front. Discoverability is crucial for small, indie devs, and competing against even 1,000 other games is still a tall order.

I would like to spotlight what I consider to be the hidden indie gems of the mystery game world. Those games that are legitimately fun and passionately made, but otherwise aren’t able to gain the visibility that they need.

If you’re interested in this planned event, then please be sure to join the Mystery Gamedev Discord Server so that you can show me your interest and help get it approved as a real event on Steam.

Again — if we want to make this happen, we have to do it together.

Remember that right now, we’re at a pivotal turning point.

There’s a lot of energy and excitement for mystery games right now.

But it’s up to us — fans and developers alike — to keep that momentum going, and create our own Golden Age. Let’s make it happen!

Thanks for reading!

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If you’re a fan of mysteries, you’ve probably had ideas for creating your own.

But you might be frozen by self doubt:

• You’re overwhelmed by the complexity of mystery stories

• You don’t think you’re smart or clever enough

• You don’t even know where to begin

So can you really make a mystery game, especially on your own as a beginner?

I’m here to tell you right now:

Yes, regardless of your level of experience, you absolutely can.

The first mystery games that I made were created when I was in high school, and people responded well to those.

So my own personal experience serves as proof that it can be done.

It doesn’t matter how old you are or how much experience you have.

You can definitely create one, even if you’re not a total master of the craft.

You just have to make something that’s good enough for other people to enjoy.

And that’s what we’re going to discuss in today’s article.

If you can write other genres, you can write mystery

Now maybe a good way to approach this idea is to think about how you might write other kinds of stories, other genres of fiction outside of mystery.

If you were going to write a romance story, the only requirement is that you know what it’s like to fall in love.

So that’s a fairly easy bar for anyone to meet, right?

If you’ve ever had feelings for someone else, you can write those feelings down and it can create an authentic story.

And especially if you’ve been in a relationship, then you can just sort of write what that narrative looks like.

Going on that journey from finding someone you meet and falling in love with them, and then going on dates with them ,and then maybe breaking up, or then maybe getting married… Or who knows what happens, right?

That’s sort of the whole adventure that goes on in a romance, right?

Now on the other hand, maybe if you’re writing a horror story, the only requirement there is that you know what it’s like to have been scared before — to be afraid of something.

And of course, everyone has had that happen to them in their own lives as well.

We all have our own fears and insecurities.

And as long as you’re able to write about them and express what those fears and insecurities are, you can basically write any kind of horror story.

And so based on those two examples, romance stories and horror stories, you might conclude that writing a mystery story requires some level of experience of being smart enough to solve a mystery on your own.

And you might get worried that you don’t have that level of intelligence, right?

That all of these mystery stories are about super genius detectives who are clever enough to outsmart a culprit in solving a crime.

And you might be thinking to yourself that you’ve never solved a crime.

You’ve never been part of a police department.

You’ve never had to deal with a murder mystery, thankfully, I hope.

And so compared to these other kinds of stories where they’re almost essential to the human experience of falling in love or being afraid of something, it doesn’t seem instantly obvious that mystery stories fit in so easily, right?

But here’s the catch.

Here’s what makes this actually pretty easy to do.

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First of all, congratulations to everyone who submitted a game for Cold Case Jam 2025! You can view and play the games here.

2025 Retrospective

It’s honestly quite difficult for me to write a retrospective of 2025. It was, objectively speaking, not a great year for me.

Probably the best thing that happened was the Mystery Game Jam in April, which received so much participation that it reinforced my belief in Mystery Gamedev and encouraged me to keep taking the risk of building tools and educational content for mystery game developers.

Aside from that, I’ve only really worked on two things this year: the Mystery Maker app, and the Mystery Game Masterclass. At the time of writing, neither one is in a usable state, but I’m working as fast as I can to make that happen within the next few weeks.

I wish I could give you an exact date, but my schedule has been hard to predict.

I’d also prefer not to get too deep into a retrospective here, because there is honestly not that much to even say. I spent most of my time building those projects. Whenever I wasn’t, I was just dealing with the plethora of real-life issues that were constantly being thrown my way.

I don’t want to be overly negative, especially on a post that you’re going to be reading on New Year’s Eve. So let’s put all that behind us and look forward to the future.

The Vision for Mystery Gamedev in 2026

Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this coming year.

Relaunch the Mystery Game Masterclass

First, is the relaunch of the Mystery Game Masterclass.

I will be launching with two options:

• Just the course content (video lessons)

• The course, plus direct mentorship with me

Both options will include a payment plan, so that hopefully the content becomes accessible to more people, particularly those with limited budgets.

The course will initially launch with the core 6 modules, but sometime later in the year I will update the course with 6 more modules that go beyond the essentials.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two months not only building a custom online learning platform, but also revamping the course content to add even more material.

By the way, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, then you’ll be given free access to the entire first module of the course. Yes, even the free newsletter subscribers. I want to prove to you that this is such good content that you have to try it out. So when the course is ready, you’ll get an email that will let you view the entire first module, absolutely free! Just be sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you aren’t already.

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Launch Mystery Maker

Next is the launch of Mystery Maker. It’s a tool I’ve made that is designed in accordance with the framework that is taught in the Mystery Game Masterclass.

The app is a new kind of “mystery outline” that is more than just a text document. It keeps track of everything in your mystery: setting, characters, clues, theories, and even your interactive puzzles. At the click of a button, you’ll be able to assess the fairness of your puzzles and verify the correctness of your overall solution.

Also, once the Pro modules of the Masterclass are finished, Mystery Maker will be updated to accommodate those modules as well.

But this is ultimately a really ambitious app to build, so it’s going to take a while.

Release game engine plugins

The Mystery Game Masterclass also gave me insight into all the different kinds of game mechanics that make up a mystery game. There are 3 main categories and a total of 9 subcategories, and my goal is to create at least one plugin for each subcategory for each major game engine. A good goal is one new plugin per month.

So, this is obviously a lot of work, and will take its own amount of time, but the goal is to improve the efficiency of making mystery games by providing a solid starting point for every mystery game developer.

These plugins will be priced significantly cheaper compared to the Mystery Game Masterclass, and will only be a one-time payment as opposed to the recurring subscription that Mystery Maker will require.

My goal is to have many different products at a variety of prices to ensure that everyone can benefit at least in some way from the tools and resources I am creating.

Mystery Gamedev services

I’m definitely trying to narrow down a specific set of services that I can offer that go beyond a generalized “mentorship session.”

Some examples of services might include:

• Fairness and solvability assessment

• Story research and fact-checking

• Puzzle difficulty balancing

I wanted to offer services as far back as 2024, but I didn’t have the infrastructure to actually do so. The point of creating Mystery Maker is to give everyone a solid “outline template” to work from, and the purpose of the Masterclass is to give everyone (including myself) a solid mental starting point from which we can assess the quality of a given mystery game.

Without having these in place, it would be nearly impossible for me to consistently offer a high quality service that actually does what I claim it will do.

You could do all of these things yourself if you follow the methods I teach in the Masterclass — or you can just ask me to do them for you. Your choice!

Mystery Game Database

The Database will be improved and some premium features will likely be offered to developers. I haven’t settled on the specifics for those premium features, but probably something along the lines of enhanced discoverability.

Some developers have also mentioned interest in turning the database into its own kind of storefront, so that people can buy mystery games directly from it. I do like that idea, and I have some other ideas that would work well with it. But it really just depends on how much progress I can make on everything else first.

Interestingly, my work on the Masterclass has led me to develop several important ways of classifying and organizing mystery games. I’ve come up with a way to break down mystery games into distinct components, both in terms of story and in terms of gameplay. It has become significantly easier for me to define what should be considered a mystery game beyond the surface-level description of “a story designed like a puzzle”, which may be still useful, but remains difficult to actually quantify.

So the Database will be updated with these new search criteria, hopefully soon, as well as many new games that have been released and will be released in the future.

Mystery Gamedev Newsletter

My work on the Masterclass also led to literally hundreds of thousands of words being written. (Technically, being spoken and then transcribed — I’m a lot faster at talking than I am at typing, though I am still fast at both!) I realized that for a video course, I needed to tighten up the pacing of each lesson, and condense the content into just the essentials for optimal learning.

It’s not as easy as you think to actually make a decent online course. It’s not just about the words you write, but how you speak them and what is on the screen while you are talking. So I learned that writing for a course is very different than writing for a newsletter.

As such, I had to “throw away” a lot of details regarding the course content. I personally think it’s a lot of cool info, but since most people have such low attention spans, it just wouldn’t be good for the course.

So, if you want access to all of those unused or “thrown away” words, the good news is that I’m going to be offering all of it to my paid newsletter subscribers.

Each course lesson will get its own dedicated newsletter article. It’s going to be a lot more dense than the course, more along the lines of an academic textbook, with meandering passages about things that I find personally worth talking about.

I’m going to release these on the usual weekly schedule, and so that means if you want to learn everything immediately, then you’re just going to have to buy the course instead. It will take at least one full year, if not more, to disseminate all of this information via the weekly blog posts. That’s just how much content I’ve been writing over these past several months!

And so, there are going to be a lot more paid newsletters going forward. There will still be at least one free article per month, and I might even let free subscribers see the first part of each paid piece. But I am unfortunately at a point where the bills need to be paid somehow, and I can’t keep offering all of this stuff for free.

There approximately 100 free newsletter articles already, and I still have plans to make free videos for YouTube as soon as I get some time for them. But I hope that people truly understand and value what I’ve been working on for the past two and a half years.

My Own Projects

Speaking of that — it sure has been a while since I’ve worked on any of my own mystery games!

Currently I have a list of over 100 game ideas (plus even more ideas for web apps and other software) that I really want to work on. It’s admittedly quite difficult at this point to set any of these ideas aside.

There is also the fact that I still need to finish Detective Butler and the King of Hearts, which was essentially put on hold since June of 2023.

The good news is that with all of the things that I’ve been working on, my own projects are going to go significantly faster. I have a much deeper understanding of the mystery genre than I had 3 years ago, and I’ve even built tools and designed systems that will speed up the actual development process.

Again, these are not just tools for me, but tools for all of you as well.

I really wanted to enter the Cold Case Jam with my own project, but I had to make finishing the Masterclass a higher priority.

However, I did try to brainstorm what I would do differently for the project that I started for the 2024 Mystery Game Jam (and never released). Within 90 minutes, I went from an idea that I struggled to make any progress on during the final two weeks of that jam, to a fully fleshed out concept that I believe would make for a legitimately fun mystery game to play.

I recorded the entire brainstorming session, so maybe I’ll make it available to paid subscribers at some point.

Regardless, I am 100% convinced that my framework is truly helpful, and I hope to only prove that point even more as I get back to working on my own projects next year.

When Vision Meets Reality

Considering all of the above, it’s going to take me a while to actually find the time to work on my own projects. It’s also very hard for me to specify any timelines at this point.

Without getting into the details, I keep having to deal with one catastrophe after another in my personal life, all of which either significantly drain my time, my energy, or my bank account, and I am running very low on all fronts.

Mystery Gamedev, for me, isn’t a hobby or side project. It’s something I’ve been building toward for most of my life. It grew out of real experiences, unresolved questions, and a long relationship with mystery as both a genre and a way of thinking. Games are the medium, but they’re not the whole point.

Perhaps I will share more about those inspirations some other time.

But passion alone isn’t a strategy. If something meaningful can’t support itself, then it eventually collapses under its own weight. I know this from previous experience. And I’m not willing to run on pure internal motivation while ignoring external reality.

So this is a period of recalibration. I have to prioritize work that stabilizes my situation. And so that means I’m being more deliberate about where my effort goes.

In the past, I’ve tried to keep everything moving at once, even when the return didn’t justify the cost. That approach isn’t viable forever. Sustainability isn’t about pushing harder, but about designing systems that don’t require constant effort just to exist.

I still believe in the work I’m doing. I still think it has value beyond myself. And I still intend to see it grow into something that justifies its existence — not through excessive sacrifice, but through real results.

Conclusion

So, I’ve outlined my vision for 2026. Hopefully it sounds like a good plan.

It’s the future that I want to live in.

I want to build these things and share them with all of you.

But if for whatever reason it doesn’t work out, I may have to spend much of my time on other things that can keep myself and my family afloat instead.

I am sure that these are just hard times right now. Despite how bad things seem, I am actually surprisingly calm. Objectively, this has to be one of the worst holiday seasons I’ve ever had, but it doesn’t actually feel that way. It just feels like an annoying bump in the road.

I wish I had more uplifting news to share. But I guess as long as I’m still in the game, that’s good enough for now.

Ultimately, 2025 was a quiet year of learning and building.

Let’s resolve to make 2026 a year of action and results.

Thank you all, and have a Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

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First, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

And reminder: only 7 days left to submit your entry to the Cold Case Jam!

Cold Case Jam is a unique event that encourages mystery gamedevs to revisit abandoned projects and finish them (or at least make substantial progress).

Its name is derived from the concept of a real-life cold case — mysteries that have gone unsolved for a long period of time — but applied to abandoned game projects.

My goal was to encourage developers to not just start games, but actually finish them. And so far, we’ve already received one submission from a previous Mystery Game Jam participant, so that’s really awesome to see!

Personally, I really wanted to work on one of my own unfinished projects, but the truth is that I’ve had so much going on that there just wasn’t any time to do much of anything these past two months.

One such incident was, ironically enough, my furnace going out and leaving me in freezing temperatures for nearly an entire week. That was not fun!

Anyway, I suppose my desire to work on a “cold case” made me do a lot of reflecting on all of my old projects. I dug deep into my own history to really examine why I gave up on my projects and whether I’m truly committed to bringing them back to life.

I hope to share some of these insights with you in today’s article.

The Anatomy of Abandonment

Most abandoned projects don’t die in one dramatic moment, but fade quietly over time.

The project you worked on every day is reduced to once a week, then once a month, then maybe once a year if you’re lucky. You stop opening folders, stop looking at files, and eventually stop thinking about it at all.

Usually developers talk about this problem in terms of getting stuck in development and being unable to ship the game. But few people ever talk about the process of giving up, or if there’s a way to revive a project that’s months or even years old.

Now, I’ve actually done that, multiple times over.

I’ve had to abandon my second Detective Butler game many times:

• In 2013, I was trying to force a sequel without any compelling ideas.

• In 2014, I finally had a compelling idea and resumed work.

• In 2018, I had to pause due to limited financial resources.

• In 2021, I tried to resume but lacked the passion I once had.

• In 2022, I rediscovered that passion through a new perspective.

• In 2023, I put the game on hold to focus on Mystery Gamedev.

• And now, with masterclass-level clarity on the mystery genre, I’m ready to get back to work it as soon as I can.

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why you might stop working on your game!

So to understand why projects get abandoned, you have to start with motivation.

What keeps you motivated?

Most people rely on extrinsic motivation. They need some kind of practical nudge: a deadline, a paycheck, public accountability, external praise, or pressure.

Extrinsic motivation lowers risk, which limits pain. It gives you a reason to keep going even when the work stops being fun. If your project is tied to income, a contract, or social expectations, you’ll push through boredom or discomfort because there’s a tangible reward awaiting you on the other side.

The tradeoff is that extrinsically motivated work rarely goes far beyond the minimum requirements. People work in proportion to the reward they’re promised. When the pain exceeds the potential reward, they pull back and give up.

Intrinsic motivation is different.

It’s the desire to see your creative vision become a reality so strongly, that you’re willing to prioritize your project and sacrifice other parts of your life to work on it.

And it’s also the willingness to keep going, in spite of all the setbacks and obstacles in your way. It’s the willingness to endure short-term pain for a long-term payoff. If you are truly motivated, then you will exhaust months or even years of effort and sacrifice, under the belief that it will all be justified when the project is finished.

The only downside — and it is a big one — is that your tolerance for pain is so strong that you’re unable to see the warning signs of a flawed project early on.

You keep going despite the lack of signal.

You delude yourself into thinking that it’s going to work out.

And so that’s what we call a high-risk, high-reward strategy: you could be wrong, and the cost of being wrong is very high.

Balancing motivation with scope

As someone with highly intrinsic motivation, I’ve felt this pain badly.

I’ve invested countless hours into projects that have completely flopped. I’ve built dozens of games that people have never played, either because the ambition was too great, or my perfectionism got in the way.

There are two reasons why I would often abandon a project:

• A project that’s too small isn’t interesting enough to begin. There’s not enough room to genuinely explore any ideas. You can already see the end from the start, so there’s no curiosity pulling you forward. You abandon this project to work on something more interesting.

• A project that’s too big isn’t safe enough to finish. The risk grows faster than the reward can justify. Sure, it’s packed full of ideas, but there’s a good chance it’s more than you can actually handle. You abandon this project to work on something you can actually finish.

In both cases, you lose.

Well, not entirely. Hopefully you learned something you can take with you to the next project. But if you don’t learn to properly scope your projects, you’ll always end up abandoning whatever new project you start.

Confidence comes from repeated wins. So when you rack up repeated losses, you train your brain to expect failure, losing confidence in yourself and resulting in burnout.

Eventually, you may get to a point where your repeated failures to finish a project culminate in your failure to even start one.

Why Mystery Games Get Abandoned

That was a lot of psychological generality, so let’s bring this back to mystery games.

Looking back at my own work, the reasons for abandonment fall into five recurring patterns. Let’s go over each reason, and how to counteract them.

Read more

Each month, I look at the best new mystery game releases to see if there are any important lessons that aspiring developers can learn from them.

Most of the games in today’s article borrow heavily from previous games or subgenres, but those are actually massive strengths. When you have an audience that is really starving for a certain kind of game, there’s no need to overthink the game itself. You just need to make sure that your execution is highly polished and flawless.

On the other hand, some other games this month took the opposite approach: massive innovation, whether it’s blending two genres that normally don’t go together, or subverting genre expectations through a story nobody has seen before.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which strategy you decide to take — both are valid pathways to success, as these mystery games clearly show!

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Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved

A woman vanishes without a trace on a cross-country train. The catch? Nobody on board remembers her ever existing in the first place - nobody, except for you. Uncover the story in this mystery adventure game!

First up is Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved. I played the demo for this game in February, and was absolutely blown away by the artwork and overall presentation of the story.

This game is heavily inspired by the mystery adventure genre, which utilizes a command-select menu system to take actions that interact with the world in various ways.

Mystery adventures were some of the first mystery video games ever created, and the developer’s deep understanding of what makes this retro genre so fun clearly shows in its faithful design.

In addition to Steam, the game is also available both in English and Japanese on Nintendo Switch. You can also learn more about the game’s development and design decisions by watching my interview with its developer from earlier this year.

Penelope Pendrick and the Art of Deceit

Pick up your magnifying glass as writer-turned-detective Penelope Pendrick in this first-person point and click mystery adventure! Three people have suddenly vanished from the sleepy town of Carlisle. Follow the clues, interrogate suspects, and solve puzzles to end this case - before it ends you.

Next up is Penelope Pendrick and the Art of Deceit. One look at its Steam page instantly made me realize this was inspired by the Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure games (which I really loved playing when I was a kid in school).

But this game clearly has its own identity and legitimate mystery. Steam reviews indicate it successfully captured fans of Nancy Drew that were dissatisfied with recent entries in the series. And it shows that indies can absolutely compete with long-established franchises.

A Case of Fraud

A short non-linear detective adventure where every clue is hidden in plain sight. Carefully read and cross-reference documents to unravel a CEO’s disappearance and expose a case of fraud.

A Case of Fraud has a similar success story. This one of the games I played on stream during the recent Steam Next Fest, and I had a lot of fun with it. The gameplay is clearly inspired by The Roottrees are Dead, as you must identify characters by searching through various documents, but with an emphasis on the specific crime of fraud.

Don’t underestimate the power of just making a good game in an established genre, whether it’s long-forgotten or inspired by a recent hit. Don’t overthink things too much and just focus on making a great mystery game for an an audience hungry for more!

Asbury Pines

A grisly mystery in a small town unfolds across centuries through the stories of its residents. Orchestrate their work, grow resources, upgrade skills, and create automated production loops between past and future eras. All to uncover a sprawling secret embedded in the flow of time.

By contrast, Asbury Pines takes an innovative approach, combining mystery-solving with idle gameplay. I’ve really wanted to see mystery games dive more into resource management, and from what I’ve seen so far, this game is a big step in that direction.

You advance the story by completing tasks and levelling up characters. Some characters are better suited to certain tasks, and some tasks require resources from other tasks, so the gameplay revolves around efficiently building a “story-unlocking engine.” The unfolding murder mystery spans multiple time periods that reveal secrets about the town and the people that live within it.

Again, don’t overthink it — mystery is popular, idle games are popular, and when you combine the two (and execute well!) you end up an unforgettable experience.

Beyond R: Rule Ripper

An evolving death game set in a bar, where getting to know its players is the only way out. Each person hides one of the game’s rules. Discover them through their pasts, tastes, and finding hidden clues, then face them in an all-out discussion. Only three can survive, unless you fight back.

Last but not least, I also played Beyond R: Rule Ripper on livestream for a few hours during the recent Steam Next Fest, and I genuinely enjoyed it, especially the characters who all have memorable designs and personalities. All of them are trapped in a “death game” where each death effectively changes the rules of the game.

Even as a visual novel with limited gameplay, the story’s innovative premise in the popular death game genre will make anyone want to play through and see how the mystery unfolds.

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, we were not paid to promote any of the above games. Each game was selected based on its relevance to our readers, considering its release date, number of positive reviews, and store page description. We are not responsible for any issues arising from attempting to purchase, download, or play any game.

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 500+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

And please consider sharing our newsletter with a friend — we appreciate it!

Hey everyone, today’s post will just be a quick update on what I’ve been working on and my plans for the next two months.

As some of you may be aware, I had to take the Mystery Game Masterclass offline last month because I realized I needed to make some improvements.

After talking with several of you and reading your feedback, it became clear the course needed two major upgrades: a more flexible pricing structure, and a tool that helps you actually implement the material. With those features, the course should become more affordable and easily demonstrate its worth.

So that’s what I’m spending my time building!

What I’m working on now:

• A brand‑new custom course platform that seamlessly integrates with the Mystery Gamedev website and eliminates expensive hosting costs. Visually it’s going to look a lot nicer and even offer previews of early lessons.

• As a result, a much more affordable pricing setup. Lower monthly payments and even a lower tier, for those of who you have limited budgets but still want to learn. Don’t worry, I am listening, and I’m doing my best to meet you where I can.

• And the big one: the Mystery Maker companion app, which connects your characters, clues, and puzzles in real time. This is the ultimate bonus for those who purchase the full package, turning all six modules of the course into a complete system for mystery game design.

These additions take time, but the end result will be far stronger than the original launch. The course and the app were always meant to work together — and now they finally will, at no extra cost to you.

When is it coming?

I have a lot of things going on right now so it’s very hard to make a prediction. I’d rather just make the announcement when I have 100% confidence everything is ready. But it’s going to take some time, as I’m essentially building two technically complicated software projects.

Considering the holidays are fast approaching, it’s likely best to just aim for an early January release. Which considering the timing of Steam’s Detective Fest, may actually be the best time to relaunch it.

There is a slight concern that it’s too far in the future and some people may forget about it by then, but I would rather take my time and do it right than rush things. I am already going as fast as I can, so it will be done when it is done.

I just figured it would be best to just announce all this ahead of time and make sure we are all on the same page. I know there are people looking forward to the course, and please continue to do so! I haven’t forgotten it and I’m actively working to get it back up and making it better than it was before.

If you want updates on my progress and want to be notified of the Mystery Game Masterclass relaunch, you can subscribe to this newsletter.

I just hope you all know that I am doing my best to follow my mission of creating tools and educational resources for developers in the mystery game niche. That’s been my goal from day one, and I’m determined to do what’s necessary to make it happen.

Thank you for your support, and please look forward to it!

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Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 500+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

And please consider sharing our newsletter with a friend — we appreciate it!

Steam’s Animal Fest runs this week, featuring games all about animals.

One trend in mystery games that I’ve noticed is the use of animal detectives. Recent hits like Back to the Dawn, Duck Detective, and BROK the InvestiGator immediately come to mind. But even older games like Frog Detective and Aviary Attorney clearly demonstrate that animal detectives have always been a popular mystery game trope.

Even outside of games there are plenty of popular animal detectives, including Scooby-Doo (dog), Basil of Baker Street (mouse), or John Blacksad (cat). And in addition to some of our Mystery Game Jam entries featuring animal detectives, I’ve definitely noticed a trend of Next Fest demos using animal detectives as well.

So, let’s sit down in our thinking chairs Blue’s Clues-style and do our best to solve this mystery!

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First, let’s make a distinction between the different types of animal detectives. Some will have a human-like (anthropomorphic) design, while others just look like normal animals in real life. Some may be the protagonist of the story, while others remain as the protagonist’s faithful companion. Some may be able to speak in human language, or otherwise communicate with humans, while others keep their deductions to themselves. Maybe they’re the only animal in a story about humans, or maybe there aren’t even humans in the story at all!

So, there are many unique ways to utilize animals as a detective character.

And that’s not even getting into how animals can be used as witnesses (like the parrot in Ace Attorney), as clues (like the classic “dog that does not bark”), as the victim (like the disappearance of the horse in Silver Blaze), or even as the culprit. We’re just going to focus on animal detectives for right now, but don’t let that stop you from thinking about more creative uses for our furry friends.

With that said, let’s dive into the reasons why animal detectives are becoming trendy.

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October was apparently a very popular month for mystery games! Not only was Next Fest filled with over a hundred demos, but it looks like there were just as many mystery-themed releases this month as well.

It’s really hard to pick out just a few, but this month there were actually five games that all come from developers who I’ve personally gotten to know. All of their games are also doing really well in terms of positive reviews, which makes me really happy to see, and so it’s easy for me to recommend all of these games for you to play. Enjoy!

Murder Is Game Over: Murder Otaku

A new stand-alone murder mystery in the Murder Is Game Over series. Solve the murder of a beautiful J-pop singer at an anime convention in a historic high-rise hotel.

The 5th entry in the Murder Is Game Over series, this murder mystery game takes place in the unique location of an anime convention.

In the game, you explore different environments, switching between a human detective who can question each suspect, and a dog that can find hidden clues.

The story is especially interesting because it follows the structure of a classic golden age murder mystery, even including a locked-room puzzle! I played through the game as a beta tester and was really impressed by the fairness and solvability of the mystery.

Also, I recently interviewed this game’s developer on the Mystery Gamedev Podcast, where we discussed his design decisions for creating the Murder Is Game Over series.

Decide 4 God

The final entry of the Abime Series. Six intruders and six captives share a high-tech prison where their moral dilemmas may lead them to a fate worse than death. Can they overcome the wiles of Empathy Systems? What dark secrets lurk behind that institution? When does knowledge become a curse?

I played the demo for this game in June when it entered Early Access, and now the game is fully completed and finally released. As the final episode in a trilogy, I know a lot of people have been awaiting this game for a really long time.

The game features an overwhelming amount of content (at least dozens of hours, according to reviews) that spans various Zero Escape-inspired puzzle sections and branching story paths.

The demo includes an initial escape room that is on a turn-based timer, and the other characters in the room change locations and dialogue depending on the time. Your interactions with the characters during these sections influence the direction of the story. There are also mini-puzzles to solve, or you can let the other characters solve them for you (at the cost of time). I’ve only played a little bit so far, but it’s definitely well-made and enjoyable fun. The art and music are excellent, too.

But to fully enjoy the story (and avoid spoilers) it’s recommended to play through the prior two games in the series first: Head AS Code and Birth ME Code.

Call of the Golden Valley

Your friend is missing in the Australian outback and you must find her. Search the Internet for clues, solve mysterious puzzles and uncover the conspiracy of the vanishing hikers of Golden Valley.

I played this game on video during Part 1 of my recent Next Fest Stream, and really enjoyed it.

This game takes inspiration from true crime stories as you must uncover the truth behind the disappearance of your friend. You play as an American tourist visiting Australia in search of your friend. You can roam a full 3D environment, interrogate characters, investigate using computers, and even take pictures with a camera.

There are also animals native to Australia wandering around the land that you will need to photograph, so it is cool to learn about the wildlife through gameplay!

Geamana Village

A first-person investigative game set in a drowned village. Explore abandoned homes, speak with the last remaining locals, and capture through your lens the destruction left behind by the toxic sludge. Gather evidence, follow every clue, and uncover the truth hidden beneath silence and decay.

I played this game during Part 2 of my Next Fest Stream and I enjoyed this one a lot, too.

This game lets you explore a huge 3D open world with levels of fog that really remind me of Silent Hill. You can drive a truck, search with a flashlight, and even take pictures with a camera to uncover clues. There are also various ways of getting killed if you’re not too careful.

Inspired by true events, you play as a journalist recently fired for getting too close to an environmental conspiracy. The world is large and mysterious characters send you on quests, so the demo definitely has you wondering about the truth beneath the surface.

SpookY2K Demo

You wake up on a cold bathroom floor, only to discover that you somehow time travelled to a Halloween party in 1999! As you try to make sense of your situation and get closer to the other guests, will your clueless involvement let the party take a deadly turn?

Although technically a demo, this game is still worth mentioning. Written by ZetaKen (who previously wrote the script for Reaplaced) plus art and direction from KigyoDev, this game ended up winning 2nd place in the Spooktober 2025 visual novel jam.

While I haven’t had the time to play it myself, it must be good if it ranked so highly in the competition! Congratulations to their team and best of luck with the eventual full release!

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, we were not paid to promote any of the above games. Each game was selected based on its relevance to our readers, considering its release date, number of positive reviews, and store page description. We are not responsible for any issues arising from attempting to purchase, download, or play any game.

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 500+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

And please consider sharing our newsletter with a friend — we appreciate it!

A few quick announcements before we get into today’s main topic:

1. Cold Case Jam starts November 1st! You’ll have two months to finish an existing mystery game. Read the rules and register here.

2. The Mystery Game Masterclass signups are temporarily offline while we resolve a technical issue. We’ll send an email as soon as it becomes available again!

3. Steam Scream Fest sale goes from today until next Monday. Good discounts on mystery-horror titles if you’re looking for something spooky!

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With Halloween being just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about the overlap between mystery and horror.

The mystery genre has always been deeply connected to the horror genre in some way.

The first modern detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was written in 1841 by the famous horror author Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s mystery certainly has a tinge of horror to it as well: the bodies of the murder victims are horrifically mutilated, ghosts and the supernatural become suspects, and the perpetrator turns out to be an actual monster.

Perhaps we could even trace the origins of horror and mystery to the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, circa 429 BC, in which the main character investigates a murder only to realize that he was the killer all along.

But the link between horror and mystery becomes even more clear when we look at the origins of mystery video games.

The first mystery video game is appropriately titled Mystery House. Released in 1980, in this game you are trapped in a Victorian mansion with a number of people, one of them the murderer, while each person gets killed off one by one. Your goal is to identify the killer and make an escape.

The developers of Mystery House, Ken and Roberta Williams (founders of Sierra Entertainment), cited Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and the board game Clue as inspirations for the game. Mystery House was not only a pioneer of the mystery game genre, but it was a pioneer of the horror game genre as well.

Many mystery games throughout the 1980s and 1990s were mystery-horror hybrids, and this blend was pivotal in developing the genre, such as in games like Otogirisō (1992) which heavily uses sound to enhance atmosphere, or Silent Hill (1999) which surrounds the player in both literal and metaphorical darkness.

Even my personal favorite mystery game, Umineko no Naku Kori Ni (2007), is filled with as much horror as there is mystery. And incidentally, Mystery Gamedev’s own collaborative project, Reaplaced (2023), ended up being a horror-mystery too.

And generally speaking, according to How to Market a Game, horror games are one of the most popular genres on Steam.

So I think these are all strong reasons why mystery game developers need to learn to use horror to their advantage.

But why are mystery and horror so closely intertwined? And what benefits does horror lend to the mystery genre?

Let’s dig deeper and find out.

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Mystery Game Masterclass Update

First, I want to mention that the Mystery Game Masterclass now has a payment plan option! If the price was holding you back, you can now pay in 3 monthly installments. All the launch-exclusive bonuses will still apply if purchased within the qualifying timeframe.

Purchasing the course not only distills 15 years of lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way into 15 hours of video content, but also funds my continued full-time development of Mystery Gamedev. If you’ve enjoyed the newsletters, podcasts, livestreams, game jams, website, tools, and so on that I’ve created — then purchasing the Masterclass, even on a payment plan option, is the best way to support the continued growth of what we’re trying to build. I can’t do it without you, so I really do appreciate your support!

Streaming Steam Next Fest

For this Steam Next Fest, I decided to stream myself playing a variety of demos. Despite playing for nearly 10 hours, I was barely able to play through 10 games, and there are well over 100 mystery game demos in the fest!

You can watch the full videos (or just skim to the parts you want to see) on the Mystery Gamedev YouTube Channel:

• Part 1

• Part 2

By the way, we’re going to start uploading more frequently on YouTube, so consider subscribing if you want to see in-depth videos covering mystery games!

I really enjoyed playing games on-stream. I used to stream my own game development from 2018 to 2021 on the Goldbar Games Twitch channel, so it was a lot of fun to go back to interacting with people live. Again, this is only something I can really do if I can work on Mystery Gamedev full-time, so your support genuinely means a lot to me.

5 Mystery Game Demos

With that said, let’s get into the list of mystery game demos.

Apparently, this fest featured so many mystery games that all 5 of the demos I’m going to mention are from developers that I’ve gotten to know through our Discord server! So I guess I will be biased for this one, but that’s okay — they are all great games that I played through on stream, if you want to see my full thoughts on them. Or better yet, if you think they sound fun, go ahead and play their demos or wishlist them yourself.

(And to be clear, there were many more games that I had fun with too, but there’s not enough room here to list them all! It’s so hard to just pick a few!)

Advent: Dawn

A research trip turns deadly when seven strangers are trapped in a vast cave beneath a remote island. 『Advent: Dawn』 is a sci-fi mystery visual novel where you must escape through fear, fractured trust, and whispers from the deep. Will you unravel the mystery before the cave unravels you?

This sci-fi mystery game is inspired by classics like Zero Escape, Ever17, and Steins;Gate. A group of researchers suddenly become trapped in a cave and must seek a way out, though not without some mystery and adventure in the process.

The game involves choices and branching paths, and there is a flowchart to help you navigate the story. The demo introduces each character, ending with some intense action, and leaves you with many questions to think about.

Beyond R: Rule Ripper

An evolving death game set in a bar, where getting to know its players is the only way out. Each person hides one of the game’s rules. Discover them through their pasts, tastes, and finding hidden clues, then face them in an all-out discussion. Only three can survive, unless you fight back.

Inspired by classic games like Zero Escape, Danganronpa, and Ace Attorney, the story involves characters forced to participate in a death game where each player represents a different rule that only that player can break. When a player is eliminated, their associated rule stops applying to the remaining players. It’s a very unique concept, and it naturally makes you wonder how the story will play out.

I remember playing a much earlier version of the demo years ago and it has come a long way since. The characters and their designs are especially unforgettable.

The story takes its time starting out, but the novel-like narration adds to the atmosphere of the world. The demo is also very long, so I can only imagine the length of the full game.

Call of the Golden Valley

Your friend is missing in the Australian outback and you must find her. Search the Internet for clues, solve mysterious puzzles and uncover the conspiracy of the vanishing hikers of Golden Valley.

This game takes inspiration from true crime stories as you must uncover the truth behind the disappearance of your friend. You play as an American tourist visiting Australia in search of your friend. You can roam a full 3D environment, interrogate characters, investigate using computers, and even take pictures with a camera.

There are also animals native to Australia wandering around the land that you will need to photograph, so it is cool to learn about the wildlife through gameplay!

Confidential Killings

A series of murders is shocking Hollywood! Use your detective skills: search the crime scene, find clues, solve the mystery. Who is pulling the strings behind these Confidential Killings?

This game plays a lot like Golden Idol but with a gritty, noir artstyle and story. You click on words to add them to your list of clues, then piece together statements about what happened, who was involved, and so on. Simple concept with great execution.

Geamana Village

A first-person investigative game set in a drowned village. Explore abandoned homes, speak with the last remaining locals, and capture through your lens the destruction left behind by the toxic sludge. Gather evidence, follow every clue, and uncover the truth hidden beneath silence and decay.

This game lets you explore a huge 3D open world with levels of fog that really remind me of Silent Hill. You can drive a truck, search with a flashlight, and even take pictures with a camera to uncover clues. There are also various ways of getting killed if you’re not too careful.

Inspired by true events, you play as a journalist recently fired for getting too close to an environmental conspiracy. The world is large and mysterious characters send you on quests, so the demo definitely has you wondering about the truth beneath the surface.

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Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, we were not paid to promote any of the above games. Each game was selected based on its relevance to our readers, considering its release date, number of positive reviews, and store page description. We are not responsible for any issues arising from attempting to purchase, download, or play any game.

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 500+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

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Happy Mystery Monday!

I am incredibly excited to announce that the Mystery Game Masterclass: From Clueless to Creator is now available for purchase!

If you’re ready to buy, then feel free to click right here. Or if you’d rather learn a little bit more about it first, then continue reading below.

What is the Mystery Game Masterclass?

The Mystery Game Masterclass is something I’ve worked on relentlessly for the past 6 months, if not the entire past two years. Even beyond that, it feels like something I’ve been working toward creating over my entire game development career.

That’s because from 2010 to 2025, I’ve spent more than 15,000 hours learning how to make mystery games work.

That time spans everything from creating my first mystery game between high school and college classes from 2010 to 2013, to working full-time on a sequel from 2015 to 2017, to developing a custom game engine from 2019 to 2021, and then spending every day since 2023 studying the design of hundreds of mystery games in depth.

All of that effort came at a real cost — not just in time, but also in opportunity. I could have taken a steady software development career, earning at least the median American income of $70,000 per year. Instead, I chose to invest those same years into mastering this craft, experimenting with every system, engine, and structure that I could.

Nearly a full decade since graduation, that’s an opportunity cost of at least $700,000 — all to discover the frameworks that now power this masterclass. The result is six complete systems that compress my own 15,000 hours of trial and error into a step-by-step process of approximately just 15 hours of easy-to-understand video content.

The 6 Mystery Game Design Frameworks

Each system is built to solve a very specific problem that all mystery game developers face at one point or another. So let’s briefly go over each system, and how they will benefit you.

Problem #1: You’ve struggled to settle on a mystery idea.

It’s often hard enough to come up with or decide on the right idea. You might get overwhelmed by possibilities, or lose interest after only a few months or even weeks of development.

Most mystery games fail before they’re ever written — not because of bad writing or design, but because the core idea wasn’t strong enough to sustain the entire process. A mystery needs more than a premise; it needs a curious question that’s both intriguing and solvable. Without that, you can’t build tension, clues, or a satisfying answer.

That’s why idea generation isn’t just “the first step.” It’s the foundation everything else rests on.

The Solution: The Mystery Ideation System

The Mystery Ideation System gives you a structured process for developing ideas that actually last. It helps you find the intersection between what fascinates you and what engages players — so your motivation stays strong through the entire project.

You’ll learn how to identify a Curious Question (the unsolved mystery that drives the story) and a Satisfying Answer (the logical truth that makes it all click). You’ll also explore how to mix and match tropes, tricks, and twists to instantly anchor your idea in a recognizable subgenre, without falling into clichés.

This system teaches you how to evaluate whether an idea is strong enough to survive development before you ever start writing or coding.

By mastering the Mystery Ideation System, you’ll be able to:

• Easily identify mystery games and what makes them fun.

• Stop wasting time on ideas that don’t hold up, because you’ll know which ones are worth pursuing.

• Stay motivated longer, because you’ll pick ideas that genuinely sustain your interest.

• Avoid creative burnout, since you’ll always have a clear sense of direction and purpose.

• Stand out in your niche, creating mysteries that feel both familiar and innovative.

Instead of staring at a blank page or cycling through abandoned projects, you’ll walk away with a concrete mystery idea that can carry an entire game from start to finish.

The Mystery Ideation System turns scattered inspiration into solid creative architecture. It’s not about chasing the perfect idea, but about building the right one, that keeps both you and your players curious until the very end.

Problem #2: You’ve spent more time planning your mystery than actually making it.

Once you’ve got a great idea for a mystery game, the next challenge hits fast: How do you actually turn that idea into something playable?

Most creators dive right into writing scenes or building puzzles, only to realize halfway through that the story doesn’t line up, the pacing feels off, and the clues don’t add up to a fair solution. You might have a brilliant twist or interesting characters, but if the structure isn’t airtight, the mystery collapses under its own weight.

It’s not just about organizing your notes, but about understanding how story and gameplay structure intertwine. A mystery must be solvable, not just surprising. It needs a rhythm that builds curiosity, delivers clues at the right time, and keeps the player one step behind the truth without losing them along the way.

So without a clear system to plan all this, you’ll constantly be fixing contradictions, rewriting dialogue, and cutting scenes that no longer fit. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and demoralizing.

A mystery without structure isn’t a mystery, it’s just chaos. You can’t test it, can’t balance it, and can’t finish it. And every time you start a new idea, you’ll be rebuilding from scratch, just as aimless as before.

That’s the point where most indie developers fail: not because their idea was bad, but because their foundation wasn’t built for such an ambitious scope.

The Solution: The Mystery Planning System

The Mystery Planning System gives you a clear, step-by-step method for turning a loose concept into a structured, playable design. It’s built specifically for mystery games, where story, puzzles, and logic must all align perfectly.

You’ll learn how to define your story structure (what happens, and why), your game structure (how the player experiences it), and how to weave both together so that each scene, clue, and event serves a purpose.

This system also introduces the principles of fair play, pacing, and solvability — the cornerstones of mystery design. You’ll learn how to plan for nonlinearity, handle branching paths, and keep the player engaged no matter how they approach your story.

Instead of guessing your way forward, you’ll have a clear framework that ensures every part of your game fits like a puzzle piece.

By mastering the Mystery Planning System, you’ll be able to:

• Turn messy ideas into clear blueprints that guide development from start to finish.

• Catch logical flaws early, before they derail months of work.

• Balance gameplay and storytelling so one never overshadows the other.

• Plan for flexibility, allowing your mystery to evolve without losing coherence.

• Build confidence in your process, knowing your design can stand up to scrutiny.

Instead of rewriting endlessly, you’ll move forward with purpose. The Mystery Planning System gives you the structure professional mystery designers use, scaled down to something you can apply right now. No guesswork, no confusion, no wasted time.

Problem #3: You’ve created a world that looks interesting, but lacks depth.

Even with a solid plan in place, many creators struggle to make their mystery feel real. The world feels hollow, the characters are one-dimensional, and the player doesn’t care about what’s happening.

You might have a detailed lore document, dozens of character bios, and pages of backstory — yet none of it connects emotionally or logically to the mystery itself.

This happens because most creators focus on worldbuilding as decoration, not as function. They create interesting worlds, but not mystery worlds — worlds full of secrets, contradictions, and relationships that generate questions worth solving.

Mystery thrives on hidden information. If your world doesn’t have layers, your players won’t engage with it deeply. Every locked door, strange rumor, or suspicious behavior should make them want to dig further. Without secrets, your game might look beautiful, but it won’t feel mysterious. Players will move through the story passively, instead of exploring actively.

The Solution: The Mystery Worldbuilding System

The Mystery Worldbuilding System teaches you how to construct settings and characters that don’t just exist, but also interact. It transforms your world into an active part of the mystery, where every location, object, and relationship hides a deeper truth.

You’ll learn how to design environments that produce clues naturally, rather than forcing you to scatter them later. You’ll create characters whose motives, secrets, and relationships generate conflict and tension automatically. And you’ll learn how to weave those threads together so that every discovery feels like peeling back another layer of truth.

This isn’t about adding more detail, but about creating meaningful detail. The kind that makes your players think, “Something about this place doesn’t add up,” and drives them to keep exploring.

By mastering the Mystery Worldbuilding System, you’ll be able to:

• Create settings that feel alive, with their own internal logic and history.

• Write believable characters who act according to their motives, not plot convenience.

• Hide information in plain sight, giving your game depth and replay value.

• Develop emotional stakes, so players care about solving the mystery.

• Build a world that players want to return to, even after the case is closed.

Your mystery will no longer take place in a world, but will instead emerge from it. Every conversation, location, and object will contribute meaningfully to the puzzle, creating a sense of immersion that keeps players hooked from start to finish.

The Mystery Worldbuilding System turns lifeless backdrops into living, breathing ecosystems of intrigue, where every secret has a story, and every story hides a secret.

Problem #4: You’ve crafted a solution that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

You’ve got your setting, characters, and story outline — but when you start piecing it all together, cracks appear: the clues don’t add up. The solution feels forced. The twist doesn’t make sense in hindsight.

Every creator faces a moment when the mystery looks solid on paper, but the logic underneath starts to crumble. You might have a dramatic ending, but the chain of reasoning that connects everything isn’t airtight. And in a mystery, logic is everything.

Players will forgive clunky dialogue or rough visuals, but they’ll never forgive a broken mystery. Even one twist that falls flat, or even trivializes the time and effort that the player put into solving the case, ruins their experience and results in a negative review.

When players feel tricked instead of challenged, they stop trusting you, and so they stop enjoying the game. The emotional payoff collapses because trust is no longer there.

This problem ruins more mystery games than anything else. And that’s what separates a decent puzzle from a truly unforgettable mystery.

The Solution: The Mystery Theorycrafting System

The Mystery Theorycrafting System teaches you how to build your mystery like an engineer, not just a storyteller. It’s a complete logical framework for constructing, testing, and refining the chain of reasoning that holds your story together.

You’ll learn how to design clues that lead naturally to deductions, create false leads that still make sense, and weave multiple theories through your story until the truth emerges as the only possible answer.

This system takes the guesswork out of making your mystery make sense by giving you clear tools to analyze every cause, effect, and connection before you even finish your game.

By mastering the Mystery Theorycrafting System, you’ll be able to:

• Design mysteries that reward deduction, not random guessing.

• Build confidence in your story’s structure, knowing every clue has a purpose.

• Deliver twists that hit hard, because they’re grounded in logic, not shock value.

• Craft mysteries that stand up to replay, where players appreciate new details each time.

• Earn your players’ trust, making them feel genuinely clever when they solve the case.

Your story will no longer rely on coincidence or contrivance. Instead, it will earn every moment of surprise. Players won’t just finish your mystery; they’ll study it, analyzing how every piece fit together so perfectly in the end.

The Mystery Theorycrafting System turns creative intuition into rigorous design. It’s how you make sure that players can’t stop talking about your game even long after the credits roll.

Problem #5: You’ve only made a passive story, not an interactive game.

Many creators reach this stage and realize something’s off. The writing is sharp and the logic is sound. But when people play it, it feels passive. Players click through dialogue, read clues, and watch the story unfold — yet they don’t feel like they’re actually investigating.

That’s because most developers design the mystery as something to be told, not something to be played. They think about plot and puzzles separately instead of seeing them as one system.

The result: games that look like mysteries, but don’t feel like them.

The player is reduced to a spectator, following breadcrumbs instead of uncovering them. And when that happens, even the most brilliant story loses its impact.

Mystery games are defined by participation. The moment the player stops feeling like an active detective, the illusion collapses. You can’t build tension, satisfaction, or immersion if the player isn’t engaged through action and decision-making.

When your game doesn’t offer meaningful interactivity, it stops being a mystery game and becomes a mystery story disguised as one. That subtle difference determines whether your game gets remembered or forgotten.

The Solution: The Mystery Interaction System

The Mystery Interaction System bridges the gap between narrative and gameplay. It shows you how to take the logic and story you’ve built, and translate it into mechanics that feel like investigation.

This system helps you design player actions that naturally reinforce your mystery’s core themes. Whether it’s questioning suspects, connecting evidence, exploring environments, or testing hypotheses, you’ll learn how to make every interaction meaningful.

You’ll also master difficulty balancing, feedback design, and puzzle integration — ensuring that every challenge feels fair, intuitive, and rewarding.

With this system, your game stops being a passive narrative and becomes an interactive experience of deduction.

By mastering the Mystery Interaction System, you’ll be able to:

• Turn passive storytelling into active gameplay that players can engage with directly.

• Design puzzles that reinforce your story’s logic, not interrupt it.

• Balance frustration and satisfaction, keeping players immersed for hours.

• Make every choice and action meaningful, tying player input directly to narrative payoff.

• Create the kind of immersion that only true interactive storytelling can achieve.

In other words, you game will make players actually feel like detectives. They won’t feel like they’re watching someone else solve the case; they’ll feel like they solved it themselves.

The Mystery Interaction System transforms your design from static to dynamic, from narrative to participatory, from “a story with puzzles” to a story that is a puzzle.

It’s the difference between something people admire once, and something they replay, analyze, and recommend for years.

Problem #6: You’ve wasted hours of effort building systems that don’t matter.

Many developers make it this far only to lose themselves in endless development. They start building, and suddenly the clear vision they had becomes buried under a pile of unfinished systems, placeholder art, and half-working mechanics.

You tell yourself you’re “making progress,” but weeks go by and nothing feels finished. The story isn’t playable yet, the puzzles don’t flow, and every time you fix one thing, you break something else.

This happens because most creators don’t define what success looks like for a prototype. They try to build the whole game instead of building the core experience. Without clear boundaries, the project grows endlessly, and burnout follows close behind.

When you get lost in building, you stop learning from your own design. You delay feedback, waste effort polishing things that don’t matter yet, and lose momentum before you ever see your game in motion.

Mystery games especially require iteration, because the logic of deduction can only be tested through play. If you can’t quickly test your ideas, you’ll never know whether your mystery actually works.

The Solution: The Mystery Prototyping System

The Mystery Prototyping System gives you a roadmap to escape the development maze. It teaches you how to identify your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — the smallest possible version of your game that still demonstrates your mystery’s core loop.

You’ll learn how to prioritize what matters most. You’ll know what to leave out, what to fake, and what to refine later. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to measure whether your prototype should actually be developed into a full game.

Most importantly, you’ll learn how to actually build what makes a mystery game an actual game. Any mystery game prototype is going to need discovery mechanics, deduction mechanics, and decision mechanics in order to represent one full cycle of the gameplay loop. Building these parts of your game efficiently is a key part of rapidly prototyping your mystery game ideas.

This system helps you build smarter, faster, and with purpose, so that every hour of effort moves your mystery closer to completion.

By mastering the Mystery Prototyping System, you’ll be able to:

• Avoid endless development loops by setting clear and achievable goals.

• See results faster, motivating you to keep improving instead of getting stuck.

• Gather useful feedback early, before investing time in unnecessary polish.

• Identify and fix design flaws while they’re still easy to change.

• Finish projects with confidence, knowing you’ve built something functional, testable, and fun.

Your project will finally move from “someday” to something real. You’ll stop spinning your wheels in endless development and start making measurable progress toward release.

The Mystery Prototyping System replaces overwhelm with clarity. It’s how you go from building endlessly to building intentionally, turning your mystery from an idea into a playable reality.

All that, and even more!

If all of those systems and frameworks sound like something that you could really benefit from in order to learn how to make a mystery game, then I have some great news for you.

All six of these systems are exactly what you’ll find in the Mystery Game Masterclass!

When you purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass, you will receive:

• The Mystery Ideation System (Module 1)

• The Mystery Planning System (Module 2)

• The Mystery Worldbuilding System (Module 3)

• The Mystery Theorycrafting System (Module 4)

• The Mystery Interaction System (Module 5)

• The Mystery Prototyping System (Module 6)

Each module comes with one quiz, one homework assignment, and helpful handouts to ensure that you truly learn and understand each system, to make real and meaningful progress toward your mystery game development goals.

The first two modules will be instantly available, with the next two modules unlocking after one week, and the final two modules (and bonus content!) unlocking after two weeks. Each pair of modules is roughly 5 hours of content, so you can spend 1 hour of focused learning each day to keep up a decent pace — or go slower if you prefer.

You will also receive a 90-day free trial of Mystery Gamedev Academy, where you can ask other enrolled students questions, and attend weekly Q&A sessions where you can ask me directly for help on the course, or any other question about your mystery game projects you might have ($75 value).

Also, as part of a limited-time launch bonus, the first 25 people to purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass will receive one complimentary (free) 60-minute Mystery Gamedev Coaching Session ($125 value).

And last but not least, also as part of a limited-time launch bonus, anyone who purchases From Clueless to Creator before January 1st, 2026 will be granted free access to the follow-up course From Prototype to Product when it’s eventually released, which will cover even more advanced topics including:

• Art and sound design

• Workflow and team management

• Demo development and testing

• Marketing and monetization

• Launching your game

From Clueless to Creator focuses on the essentials of all mystery game design that novices will enjoy, while From Prototype to Product focuses on making a complete mystery game experience aimed at more accomplished developers. Both courses are two halves of the Mystery Game Masterclass, and so like I said above, all early buyers (prior to January 1st, 2026) will receive the second half as soon as it comes out at no extra cost.

Think of it as a way to support its development, while getting a great deal for yourself in the process.

So, the question that you are probably wondering is, of course, how much is this going to cost you?

Maybe a better question to ask is how much it’s going to cost you not to buy the Mystery Game Masterclass.

Remember, I gave up the safety of a stable software career to spend 15,000 hours mastering one thing: how to design mystery games that truly work.

You don’t have to.

Instead, you can access every framework, every test, and every lesson distilled from over a decade of firsthand experience for just one single payment of $497.

You’re not just buying a course. You’re reclaiming the years I already spent figuring it all out. You’ll still need to put in your own effort and do the actual work to build your game, but at least you’re starting on a solid foundation and with someone to help you out every step of the way — from clueless to creator, and from prototype to product.

If this sounds like the best thing you’ve ever heard, then you can purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass by clicking right here.

Or if you’re still on the fence, you can read through some of my previous posts on the topic:

• Part 1: Why the masterclass was made

• Part 2: Frequently asked questions

• Part 3: Topics the masterclass covers

Otherwise, I’m still going to provide you with all the free content that you’re used to receiving from me. Whether it’s these newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, the mystery game database, or game jam events, I still want to keep creating things for the community.

So any financial support I receive will enable me to continue my work on Mystery Gamedev full-time, and to keep those things freely available for everyone else.

And so as always, I greatly appreciate all of your support, no matter who you are or how you’ve managed to help. Even though I’ve done so much work, Mystery Gamedev is just not possible without you.

So thank you for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, and in return, I hope to be able to give the same to you.

(Click here to buy the Masterclass now!)

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Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn how to make your own mystery game…

Or if you want to discover the best mystery games before anyone else…

Join our 500+ member Mystery Gamedev community today!

And please consider sharing our newsletter with a friend — we appreciate it!