In addition, the game has several timed events which, if missed, alter the course of the ending. Chief among these is that Blade Runner randomises who among your suspects is a replicant at the start of the game, meaning you actually have to figure it out yourself. But it has a couple of neat ideas that push it toward proper sleuthing. Tasked with hunting down a group of replicants, the story runs parallel to that of the film, right down to many of the locations you visit.īlade Runner is probably the most adventure-like game on this list, with a point and click interface and some typically bamboozling puzzles. The 1997 adaptation of Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece sees you play as McCoy, another Blade Runner prowling the wet and smoggy Los Angeles of alt-2020. You have to locate hidden web-pages, find passwords to get into locked files, and masquerade as a hacker to infiltrate hacking communities. The how of tracking down this illicit material makes Hypnospace one of the best sluethers around. Given its incredibly garish visuals, you’d be forgiven for dismissing Hypnospace as a serious detective game. Inspired by the Internet of the late nineties, particularly prototypical social networks like Geocities, Hypnospace Outlaw puts you in the role of an Enforcer, an online detective assigned to track down illegal content on the Hypnospace, ranging from pirated content to malware and beyond. Witty, clever, and thoroughly entertaining, Discworld Noir is a unique gaming oddity that’s still well worth playing today. It’s about having pointed conversations with shifty characters while a soft jazz soundtrack plays in the background, all draped in the rain-slick stonework and wry humour of Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork. With its blocky 3D graphics and fixed camera angles, Discworld Noir may resemble a fantasy Grim Fandango, but it eschews the obscure puzzling of traditional adventure games for a more direct focus on the act of sleuthing.
But in classic noir fashion, what starts out as a simple case quickly spirals into something much bigger and more dangerous. Approached by a mysterious woman named Carlotta, Lewton sets off on a trail to find her missing ex-lover Mundy. Just avoid follow-up, The Devil’s Daughter, which wasn’t so much a step backward as it was a somersault off a cliff.Ī detective game based in Terry Pratchett’s inimitable comic fantasy world, Discworld Noir puts you in the trenchcoat of Lewton, the Discworld’s first private dick. It’s worth noting however, that those conclusions may not necessarily be correct, so you can’t just rely on Holmes to do the work for you.Ĭombined with a moody and atmospheric Victorian London and some decent writing to boot, Crimes & Punishments is a great place to start your sleuthing adventures. Using Holmes’ own mind as a pinboard, you can connect different pieces of the puzzle and follow the resulting conclusions. The exception to this is Crimes & Punishments, a superb sequence of Victorian mysteries that require genuine deduction to solve.Ĭrimes & Punishments’ crucial evolution over previous Sherlock Holmes games is how it lets you identify clues and put them together yourself. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishmentsįrogwares has been making Sherlock Holmes games for at least a decade, most of which have been too clunky and idiosyncratic to make the most of the premise.
Let’s put on our trilbies and sniff out which game occupies that no.1 spot.ġ0. Hence, this rundown focuses primarily on games about detection and deduction, rather than games that simply put you in the role of a detective.
This new breed of detective games is specifically about asking the right questions, seeking out evidence, and most importantly, putting the clues together yourself to form your own deductions. Within the last decade, however, detective games have coalesced into their own mini genre, as various titles have experimented with new ideas and systems dedicated to creating experiences revolving around sleuthing. Aside from a couple of notable outliers, the closest you could get was an adventure or puzzle game with a detective-y theme, such as Broken Sword or Professor Layton. It would have been almost impossible to write this list a few years ago, as the entire concept of a detective game didn’t really exit.
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