There are so many games out there now that it’s a lovely surprise when you find something you really like. It’s an even lovelier surprise to find out that there’s more of it. That’s exactly how I felt halfway through The Mermaid Mask when I learnt it’s the latest in an ongoing series of point & click mysteries starring Detective Grimoire and his oh-so-cool sidekick Sally, Thanks to a truly compelling mystery and a fantastic cast of characters I firmly consider myself a fan of the series now.
The Mermaid Mask doesn’t waste any time getting started, with Grimoire and Sally hiding out in a dilapidated old building with only a case file for context. My immediate impressions were that this felt a little jarring and cold, however the minute you set foot on The Mortuga Submarine, the game’s primary location, those impressions melted away as I got sucked into the story and the delightful cast of characters it features.
You see, the submarine was owned by Magnus Mortuga, a legendary sea captain who was recently the victim of a locked room murder, so the new captain has recruited you to come aboard and smoke out the killer. It’s an irresistible premise which quickly steamrolls into a full on mystery, featuring prominent members of the local town of Silkwerm-on-sea, Hollywood superstars and more than a few touches of the supernatural. It’s a lot of fun, and although some plot points are a little telegraphed, there’s a lot there to keep you guessing right through to the end and at no point did I work out who’d done it until the game told me.
It’s all elevated by a genuinely excellent cast of supporting characters who you can’t help but love even though you’re there to work out if any of them are cold blooded killers. They’ve all got their own motivations and circumstances that brought them to Mortuga’s submarine, and with them spilling out of the bunkrooms into the engine room, cargo hold and more, it makes the vessel feel like a refuge for the weird and wonderful.
There’s J.D Wirman, the weary writer struggling to pen a sequel to his breakout hit. Tadpole, the hulking half-mermaid Dirk, the equally large Chris Evans-esque Hollywood himbo and about 10 others. My personal favourite was Godrik Gripp, an eccentric balloon-flying merchant who immediately opens up an in-game UI the minute you meet him even though there’s no currency system in the game. Everyone is fully voice acted, and every performance is pitch perfect. Between the voices and the gorgeous hand painted visuals, it makes the game feel like a high quality modern cartoon as much as it does a game.
Your time on the Mortuga Submarine is largely spent sleuthing with a smattering of puzzles to keep things fresh. There are about a dozen rooms to explore at your will and each environment is packed full of things to interact with. Often you’ll find things that serve as clues and these get logged in your case file, where you can pan around them in 3D and you may find additional interactive elements that give them a nice tactile feel. One minor quibble is that controller support is essentially just moving a cursor with your left stick, and it works but can be a bit cumbersome when trying to select smaller items.
You spend a lot of time gathering clues, but it’s how you use them that’s most interesting. For that you’ll need to start speaking to the other guests on board. When you initiate a conversation you can run through the basics, covering introductions, a bit of backstory and then their experience of the period just before Mortuga croaked it.
Where it gets more exciting though is that you can ask them to comment on any of their fellow suspects or on any of the evidence you’ve found so far. This is vital for opening up additional context on the evidence you’ve found, as someone may know how a particular item is used which then completely changes how you think of it. Everything gets logged in your case file, including comments made by other characters, and once you’ve got enough evidence relevant to a particular suspect you can raise a suspicion about them, which involves a series of madlibs style sections as you use evidence to build a case for why they may not be as innocent as they say they are. It’s a fun system and creates more impactful moments that reveal important context and backstories.
Occasionally while snooping around you’ll happen upon a puzzle, usually required to open some sort of box or door that’ll lead to more evidence to help you progress the story. These were a bit of a mixed bag for me, although I suspect that’s because of my monkey brain rather than the fault of the puzzles themselves. There’s a healthy mix of puzzles in the game, with some leaning more on numbers and sequences whereas others bombard you with symbols or require you to manipulate items in a 3D plane to create patterns which is where my brain struggles. There was only one puzzle where I found the instructions and (already gentle) hint system to be insufficient, and led to me brute forcing my way through.
There were some puzzles that stalled my progress for a day or two, which didn’t matter at first as I could just go and do more sleuthing elsewhere but eventually I had to confront them. This halted my progress for a bit and took some of the momentum out of the story, although these were limited to the first half of the game and the second half flowed better.
My only other minor gripe was the ending. Now, don’t get me wrong, it tied up the mystery with a nice neat bow on it but I was hoping for a little more. There’s an event at the end of the game that I’d love to know more about, although realistically there was probably no way they could have elaborated on it. Additionally, I think part of the ending will make more sense to those that have played Tangle Tower, so I was a bit lost at one of the references.
Regardless of these few minor quibbles, everything in The Mermaid Mask comes together to create one seriously compelling whodunnit. I loved the characters, the story and the process of slowly unravelling a mystery that constantly gets wilder and wilder, and now that I know it’s a series, I’ll definitely be diving into Grimoire and Sally’s backlog of cases.
