No detective can resist the siren call of a locked-room mystery
Developer/publisher SFB Games
Format PC, consoles TBA
Origin UK
Release 2024
The time is four o’clock – in the morning, of course, because mysteries never sleep, and neither do those who solve them – and Grimoire is naturally up and ready to get started. His assistant Sally, on the other hand, is slumbering sweetly – at least for the time being. An eerie green light creeps through the gaps between the beams across the windows of their dilapidated temporary headquarters.
Outside The Stonetop Inn, meanwhile, a mist hangs over the dock like a ghostly shroud. By the pier, a submarine’s fin pokes out of the dark waters like that of a shark waiting in the shallows for its unwitting prey.
Opening the case file reveals the details of the murder the pair are about to investigate. Inside the submersible, the body of its captain, Magnus Mortuga, has been found, lying prone on the floor with a clean cut across his throat but no sign of a blade nearby. Upon entering, he’d locked himself inside a room known as the Illusion Theatre, within which there is little furniture, aside from a heavy cauldron with a metal lid that had never previously been unlocked. Well, now it has – and there are several gashes scored into its stone interior.
It’s a classic opening for a locked-room murder mystery, one that swiftly establishes an atmosphere of rich intrigue and mild trepidation, while introducing a series of curiosities, each begging to be explored. We shiver a little upon sighting a painting of a large, mysterious aquatic entity, ominously accompanied with a single word in capital letters: ‘HER’; likewise a haunted-looking wooden buoy chained to the deck. We let out a quiet chuckle at Sally’s sardonic responses to Grimoire, her sleepy eyed delivery belying the fact that she’s now firmly awake. Our eyebrows raise when Sally observes that a stool inside the Illusion Theatre is identical to those in the Stonetop Inn. And our forehead wrinkles as we peer through circular windows and rotate dials until the number of sides on the shapes visible through the glass matches the tallies stamped across it.
If you played SFB Games’ Tangle Tower, in other words (or, for that matter, either of the two Detective Grimoire games before that), you’ll feel right at home. And if you didn’t, no matter: this is a self-contained mystery. Indeed, as writer and designer Adam Vian notes, you can’t get much more selfcontained than a submarine: “They’re in the ocean, they’re all locked in – it’s a perfect murder-mystery bubble.” The setting itself lends an ad
