The Mermaid Mask review from The Verge’s Jay Peters puts SFB Games’ next point-and-click title in the sweet spot for players who want a contained murder mystery with a lot of poking around. Peters describes the game as a strong vacation mystery, the kind that kept him playing later than planned.
The game comes from SFB Games, the studio behind Tangle Tower. It brings back Detective Grimoire and Sally, who return as the player characters for another case built around talking, inspecting, and deducing rather than reflex tests or combat. That structure makes the game closer to a visual novel, Peters writes, with the Ace Attorney series cited as a useful comparison.
What is The Mermaid Mask about?
The Mermaid Mask opens with the captain of a submarine dead inside a locked room. Peters reports that the body is found beside a strange cauldron, with blood on the floor, which gives the game its central locked-door problem: how does a murder happen in a cramped underwater vessel where space and movement are already constrained?
The submarine is doing more than providing wallpaper. According to Peters, the limited physical footprint sharpens the mystery because every room, object, and person aboard feels like part of the machinery of the case. Good locked-room mysteries live or die on constraints, and this one apparently has the decency to make its constraints physical.
The suspect list is built for interrogation. Peters names several people aboard the submarine: a sour-tempered author working on a follow-up to a successful novel, an actor starring in a film adaptation of that book, a young woman who stages elaborate illusions, and a man whose field is the study of dreams. That is a lot of theatrical nonsense for one submarine, which is exactly the point in a detective game.
How does it play?
Peters says players spend most of their time as Grimoire and Sally speaking with suspects, searching rooms, inspecting items, and solving puzzles. The rooms are described as dense with small details and clickable objects, giving players frequent reasons to test the environment instead of marching through dialogue prompts on autopilot.
Voice acting appears to be one of the game’s stronger systems rather than just decoration. Peters writes that he often selected as many objects as he could find because he wanted to hear how the characters would respond. In a point-and-click mystery, that matters: the reward for curiosity has to be better than a shrug and a reused bark.
The available review material does not list release platforms, price, or a launch date. What it does establish is narrower and more useful for mystery fans: SFB Games is following Tangle Tower with another character-heavy detective story, this time using a submarine, a dead captain, and a locked room to keep the case boxed in.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
