I'm Obsessed With Detective Games, And I Think These 9 Prove That...

There's just something about solving mysteries in games. Piecing together clues, interrogating suspects, and finally discovering that oh-so-satisfying answer. It's absolute magic.

Needless to say, I'm a bit of a genre obsessive—and particularly this year, I found myself sleuthing through a record number of modern classics.

I think 2025 was one of the best detective game years ever, if not the best. Who knows what it was about these particular twelve months that suddenly made the idea of criminals actually suffering consequences so appealing? That’s enough of me being hilarious—on with the list!

The CEO of a tech startup has been murdered, and you need to solve it by identifying the names, job titles, and even the pets of everyone who worked there.

Openly inspired by The Roottrees are Dead (more on that game later!), this is much simpler. Piles of evidence are just dumped on you rather than revealed through anything as clever as that game’s brilliant built-in search engine. But it’s still a great little game that makes inspired use of the office setting.

God bless the HR nightmare who helped me identify most of the women on the systems team because he kept hounding them for dates on the workplace chat.... ugh.

Proof that one of gaming’s least-respected genres can be an excellent way to tell a story. It’s a resource-management idle game (stop booing) where you unlock townsfolk and put them to work rifling through the bins, working at the diner, and practising a religion that involves worshipping a giant sloth. You're rewarded with little nuggets of story that offer more insight into a murder that rocks the town.

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Set over several distinct time periods, Asbury Pines smuggles a narrative of surprising scope into a game where all you really do is assign people jobs and then wish they’d hurry the hell up. So its managed to simulate the agonising wait for revelations between episodes of a TV detective drama. Er, good!

Customers come into your horrible little shop with queries like “my neighbour forgot my birthday, got any cursed talismans that’ll ruin her life?" or “I’d like a Munted Leg please! No, I don’t care to offer any details as to what that is”. You then use your almost-helpful books, along with your senses of sight, touch, smell, and general vibes to deduce which antiquity they want. And hand it over to a clearly dangerous individual instead of cal

Source: PC Gamer