Video games test for a lot of things: Hand-eye coordination, pattern recognition, the ability to know if a red barrel will explode dramatically when shot. (Yes.) But one of the most complicated things they test for is comprehension: The ability to understand something you’re being shown in only half-glimpses; to intuit a story being hidden in the shadows; to solve, in other words, a mystery. It’s one of the reasons I find detective games—like SFB Games’ delightful, low-key new title The Mermaid Mask, the latest installment in the studio’s charming Detective Grimoire series—so fascinating. It’s easy, after all, to test whether a player knows how to click on a human being’s head and make it explode via high-speed bullet delivery; far harder to see if they can ferret out the secrets hidden inside a person’s skull via less, well, drastic methods.
The Mermaid Mask charts a fairly gentle course on this score, with most of its playtime split between conversations with its bright and cartoonish cast of murder suspects, and abstract puzzle solving meant to break up the walls of well-written, enthusiastically delivered dialogue. Eventually, though, the game does ask its digital detectives to make some genuine logical leaps, which it usually tests by presenting players with an abstract fill-in-the-blank routine where nouns and verbs have to be slotted into a sentence in order to reveal a deeper mystery. As with any good adventure game, the list of options serves as a bounding box for the player’s speculative mindset; you can use the offered list of verb statements (which can get pretty complex, given that this is a locked room mystery set aboard a supposedly cursed submarine) to narrow your understanding of what might be going on.
At the same time, the game never forces its players to make any truly massive or unsupported leaps, instead laying a trail of breadcrumbs with its huge array of clues that eventually zero in on the killer. There are detective games out there where you feel like you’re simply the chauffeur for the playable detective, who then spouts off epiphanies you may or may not have hit on yourself—I recently started playing the 2021 rereleases of Nintendo’s old Famicom Detective Club games, which are awful about this sort of thing—but Mermaid Mask does a good job of keeping you and in-game heroes Grimoire and Sally at roughly the same pace.
I think about this sort of thing a lot, though: About how to genuinely test if a player understands what’s going on. (As someone who works primarily in news at The A.V. Club, I’ve come to consider “What the fuck is actualy going on here?” to be the one truly important question of modern living.) The biggest development in this realm in recent years has, of course, been the rise of the Obra Dinn-like, with games like The Roottrees Are Dead, The Case Of The Golden Idol,and The Incident At Galley Houseall giving players a gigantic document to fill in, with the assumption that doing so will require them to ferret out huge chunks of information surrounding those tested-for factoids. (For instance: Return Of The Obra Dinn is basically unsolvable until you gain at least a basic understanding of the ranks and duties of topmen, bosuns, and midshipmen aboard its titular doomed ship, even if the game never explicitly tests for that information.) Because these games often ask players to fill in huge arrays of information, they usually have to introduce artificial systems to help players check their work as they go; the mild dissatisfaction of a voice from beyond telling you you’ve locked in three more identities in Obra Dinn or Roottrees then inevitably being offset by the pure satisfaction of knowing you were right.
(By the way, if you’re just looking for a few more recommendations for games of this ilk, which are coming up like beautiful weeds at the moment, give an eye to The Red Pearls Of Borneoor The Archives Of Trevosa, both shorter, excellent additions to the canon.)
On the far side of the “let’s make a game of it” front, meanwhile, are games like Sam Barlow’s Her Story and Immortality(and, to a slightly lesser extent, titles like Tendershoot’s Hypnospace Outlaw), games that don’t really bother to quiz the player at all. (See also Tequila Works’ fascinating and underplayed 2017 “game” The Invisible Hours, which is essentially a play in video game form, like a sort of digital, Nikola Tesla-heavy Sleep No More.) These games have light interactive elements, as players use different mechanics to uncover pieces of a larger story. But besides giving a sort of ending once you’ve viewed enough video clips or fake web sites, they don’t really worry about telling players when they’re done, instead inviting them to follow their narratives until they believe they understand them in full. This can occasionally leave things feeling a tad anticlimactic—but also more honest than the external verification system used in the Obra Dinn imitators.
Still, playing through games like Mermaid Mask does occasionally fill me with a yearning for the detective games of yesteryear—and most especially my beloved Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney games, which have now gone an extremely depressing nine years since getting a new full installment. (Although the American releases of Japan-only games like The Great Ace Attorney Chroniclesand Ace Attorney Investigations 2 in recent years have helped to dull the pain a bit.) The basic formula for the Phoenix games, which forces the players to understand situations by exposing lies being told about them, is so brilliant that I’m surprised it hasn’t been ripped off more extensively. (Although there was that bizarre Harvey Birdman game for the Wii, as well as some of the gameplay in the now-also-defunct Danganronpa games.)
Given that they often relied on players giving singular correct answers to complex questions—often with game-ending penalties hanging in the balance—the Ace Attorney games could sometimes get bogged down in moment-to-moment logical glitches. But there’s something deeply satisfying about unraveling lies, an act that requires the player to know at least as much as their antagonist to perform. (The series’ famous over-the-top reactions when a villain has been exposed only emphasize the feeling that you’re actually defeating someone by bringing the truth to light.) Those looking to recreate the lie-busting thrill do have options, mostly in the indie space, where games like Nina Aquila: Legal Eaglehave cheerfully copied the formula. But I find myself missing the middle ground of a true Phoenix game even as I’m enjoying the rise of both the “holistic detective” and “detective-as-spreadsheet-manager” games.
Understanding is a hard thing to quantify. There’s nothing quite so unsatisfying as playing a mystery game—which, in their own way, are just as much escapist power fantasies about being eccentric geniuses as Doom games are about being unstoppable demon-killing machines—where you push forward through blind luck, the script spouting great revelations while you, the player, are left miserably in the dark. On that score, The Mermaid Mask might honestly be too gentle. (Although it makes up for that mild deficit by being funny, quick-moving, and generally pretty clever.) it’s hard to blame SFB Games for that, though: Comprehension continues to be an unsolved problem for game designers to pursue. Ironically, it’s a much harder moving target to know what’s going on inside a human skull than to simply make it explode.
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