Case File 081 · Narrative and Game Design

What Makes a Good Detective Game?

The design qualities that make detective games work, from fair clues and deduction checks to feedback and room for doubt.

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished 16 September 2026Updated 16 September 2026

A good detective game makes the player do the detective's thinking. Instead of watching a clever investigator solve the case, you gather information, form a theory and then prove it to the game in a way that is hard to fake. The best examples share a few traits: the clues you need are fairly available, the game has a clear way to check your reasoning, it confirms progress often enough to keep you going, and it leaves room for doubt instead of reducing everything to a single click. Games as different as Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Her Story and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy meet these standards in different ways. This article looks at what those designs have in common, drawing on published talks, interviews and essays by the people who study and make them.

Key takeaways

The core of a detective game is reasoning done by the player, not by the protagonist.
The game needs a "tester": a way for you to prove you have worked something out without guessing your way through.
Fairness matters. The information needed to solve a case should be available before the answer is required.
Frequent, partial confirmation keeps long cases from becoming frustrating.
Some of the most interesting designs deliberately leave room for uncertainty.

Does the player do the thinking?

This is the first test. Many games have detective protagonists, but in some of them the character makes the deductions while the player walks between cutscenes. A detective game in the stronger sense hands the reasoning to the player.

Game critic Mark Brown puts it this way in his 2023 essay What Makes a Great Detective Game?: the genre works when it asks players to "think about information in a way that a detective might". He sorts recent games into three broad styles:

Style (Mark Brown's terms)	What the player does	Examples Brown discusses
Deduction	Answers specific questions using the information provided	Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Scene Investigators
Contradiction	Tests the truth of statements against evidence	Ace Attorney, L.A. Noire
Investigation	Searches a large space of information for what matters	Her Story, Shadows of Doubt

The categories overlap, but they are a useful reminder that "detective game" covers several distinct kinds of mental work. A player who loves filling in a logic grid may not enjoy searching a database, and the reverse.

How does the game check your reasoning?

Brown calls this part of the design "the tester": the mechanism "for the player to prove to the game that they've figured something out". It is arguably the hardest part of detective game design, because a weak tester lets players succeed without understanding.

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018) is his main example of a strong one. As Brown describes it, you choose each identity from the full list of crew members rather than from a short multiple-choice menu, and the game only confirms fates once you have three correct. Both choices make guessing unrewarding.

Jon Ingold of inkle devoted a GDC 2022 talk, The Burden of Proof, to the same problem. The session description explains how Overboard! lets the player assemble a solution "from evidence and speculation" and receive specific feedback without removing their creativity.

Our analysis: a tester is only as good as the answer space it offers. If there are three options, players can try all three. If there are sixty names and several causes of death, they have to reason.

Is the information fair?

A mystery feels cheap when the answer depends on something the player could never have known. Detective fiction has argued about this for a century. In his Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (1928), S. S. Van Dine wrote that "the reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery".

Games face an extra challenge: the player controls where they look and in what order. Ron Gilbert, writing in his 1989 essay Why Adventure Games Suck, argued that "puzzles and their solutions need to make sense" and that each solved puzzle should bring the player closer to understanding the story. Those principles translate directly to clues. For a closer look at the techniques involved, see How Mystery Games Hide Clues Without Cheating.

Does the game confirm progress often enough?

Long cases need checkpoints. Gilbert's essay lists "incremental reward" as a rule: the player "needs to know that she is achieving". Brown makes a related point about The Case of the Golden Idol (Color Gray Games, 2022), noting that it confirms each part of a case as you solve it rather than making you complete the whole case in one go.

Our analysis: this is a balance. Confirm too often and the game starts solving itself. Confirm too rarely and a single wrong assumption early on can sink an hour of work without the player knowing where they went wrong.

Is there space for the player's imagination?

Not every good detective game is a strict logic puzzle. Sam Barlow's GDC 2016 talk on Her Story was framed around the idea that "a player's brain is still the world's most powerful game engine". In a Game Developer interview, Barlow described checking how well connected the game's video clips were, so that the story would stay satisfying "whatever the order you discover the pieces in".

Her Story shows that the tester does not always need to be a form to fill in. Sometimes the proof is the player's own understanding, built from fragments.

Can a detective game leave the answer open?

Some designers go further. Josh Sawyer, director of Pentiment (Obsidian Entertainment, 2022), told Game Developer that the team removed an alibi system from an early version because it only excluded suspects, and "we're trying to rule people in, not rule them out". The game asks you to accuse someone without the certainty of a confirmed solution.

Our analysis: this does not break the rules of a good detective game so much as shift the challenge. The work moves from proving an answer to judging motives and living with the decision. It can work when players understand that certainty is not on offer. For more on endings that land, read What Makes a Satisfying Mystery Solution?.

What are the common failure points?

Drawing on the sources above, detective games tend to struggle when:

Guessing is cheaper than thinking. Brown notes that contradiction games can let players "tediously try every piece of evidence on every single statement".
The protagonist is smarter than the player. Deductions happen in cutscenes before the player has made the connection.
Clues are arbitrary. The answer depends on a leap the game never set up.
Feedback is missing or constant. Either the player is lost, or the game does the work for them.
The case is too big for the format. A long case with few checkpoints is hard to play in short sittings.

What does this mean for an interrogation game?

Interrogation adds a specific difficulty. The information is not lying on the floor of a crime scene; it comes from a person, and people are inconsistent for many reasons. Research on deception supports caution: a meta-analysis by Bond and DePaulo (2006) found that people judge lies and truths correctly only about 54% of the time. A good interrogation game therefore has to test careful reasoning about statements, not a belief that a nervous gesture reveals a lie. See How Interrogation Becomes a Gameplay Mechanic for how different games approach this.

Is there an upcoming detective game built on these ideas?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. It focuses the detective work on a single activity: questioning suspects. According to its press materials, cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions and centre on behaviours such as fabrication, avoidance, narrative gaps and emotional leakage. Development materials show an evidence board for linking statements that do not fit together and a branching case map with multiple endings, including a "not guilty" result.

That short, self-contained format puts pressure on the qualities above: a small case needs fair information and a clear way to test your reasoning. Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027. Learn more in What Is Murder Book?