
But The Witcher 3 is all about solving mysteries, and you can absolutely mess them up if you’re not paying enough attention. Witchers are monster hunters, which might mean they don’t immediately spring to mind when you think of the best detective games.

Using actual actors instead of video game graphics, it’s as voyeuristic as video games get. Using this database, you enter specific keywords and find clips associated with the words until you eventually form a picture of the mystery in your head. It’s just you and a computer filled with video files. Her Story doesn’t tell you anything at the start. Mind you, you could just as easily leave the body up there and figure out who you are, hunt some cryptids, or befriend a kid to score amphetamines instead. Disco Elysium starts small, asking you to find a missing shoe, but it soon opens up into a proper murder mystery game, where you’re tasked with finding out who killed the guy hanging from the tree behind the hotel you’re staying in. It’s just another day in the life of a deadbeat cop who loves narcotics and might die of a heart attack if you try to reach for his tie, which is somehow hanging from the ceiling fan.
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When you’re not doing that, you’re free to explore a gorgeous recreation of ’40s Los Angeles.ĭon’t mind the vomit and urine on your shoes, pal. You see, this one’s all about reading people – every facial tic, every chew on a wasp.

These days, it might seem like everyone’s chewing on an entire packet of dry crackers when they’re talking, but these exaggerated expressions are key to the game. The facial animations in this game were revolutionary at launch. Sometimes you just have to blow the house down (or smash a pint glass into some goon’s face). You never have all the answers, and there’s usually only a choice between ‘bad’ and ‘slightly less bad’, but you still feel like a detective peeling back the layers of a case. It’s pure noir, opening up with Bigby Wolf receiving a severed head in a parcel at his door. The only game you’ll likely ever play where ‘glass them’ is offered as an option alongside dialogue responses, The Wolf Among Us places you in the shoes of the Big Bad Wolf, a famous detective in the world of this dark fairy tale. You find the crew’s bodies, see a vignette of their death play out, and use the other clues you have to deduce who everyone is from the ship’s logs. There’s very little hand-holding here, and that’s what makes it so satisfying. You start the game by boarding the Obra Dinn, a ship whose crew has disappeared. He’d show them all.ĭon’t be put off by its ‘1-bit’ monochromatic graphical style inspired by early Macintosh games – Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the best mystery games ever made.


The pieces were all there, and now he just had to put them together in some kind of list format – people like their information digestible, see? Nobody wants facts that fester in the gut like reheated takeout. There they were, the best murder mystery games, dancing in his peripheral vision like ocular floaters after too many whiskeys. The answer came to him like a shotgun slug through the eye socket. “What are the best detective games?” he asked himself. Detective McKeand was thinking the case over, pouring over the clues as the rain tapped on his window. It was seven o’clock in the morning and you could tell from the aroma of coffee rising in the air like decomposition gas from a long-dead stiff.
