Allison Weiss
Game Designer & Artist
Tangle Tower
By SFB Games
Lately, I have been trying out a bunch of Apple Arcade games that have caught my eye (this also served as an excuse to replay Sayonara Wild Hearts). Aside from having a solid stylized aesthetic, something was familiar about Tangle Tower that was drawing me to it–the name of the player character, Detective Grimoire. I was unsure of where I heard it before, and realized that it had come up during a brainstorming session for a student game development project I had taken part in last year.
I and a group of classmates wanted to make a detective game with a mechanic that would serve to twist the tropes of detective game mechanics, without over-complicating them. We wanted to approach the issue of how to make a player interact with environmental clues and have them really think through how they all connected, so that they would figure out for themselves the solution to any puzzle. Detective Grimoire arose in our conversation because it accomplished this in a very interesting way. In order to solve a crime and come to a conclusion, you had to put together your claims by filling in the blanks of a sentence with a set of pre-selected clauses, like the ‘maid’ ‘killed him’ with ‘the knife’ because ‘he was a dirty boy’. The twist that made it separate from how the true mystery ancestor , Clue/Cluedo, was the vast amount of selectable clauses. This made likelihood of happening upon the successful combination extremely low, thus increasing the player’s need to think things through. Though our project went another way mechanically, Detective Grimoire stayed with me. Today, I am going to go into the new installment in the series, as well as the neat history of its predecessors.
A Look Back
Detective Grimoire
Good ol’ fashioned Flash game art.
Journey back with me, to the long bygone era of the early 2000’s, all the way back to 2007. Now give me a minute, because I am just now realizing that was 12 years ago (hooo boy, aging amiright?).
The flash game, seen to the left, is more simple than the games that follow its example. Instead of selecting every clause of a sentence, you only put your conclusion together at the end of the game, and it tells you clause by clause if you got it right.
I was honestly surprised by how good this game is, considering it’s an old flash game. There is a whole cast of characters to interact with and interrogate, whom you often have to revisit, and each of them has a nice touch of voice acting (hmm’s, huh’s, extraneous noises like that). On top of character interactions, there are some hands-on environmental puzzles to solve to find key evidence. It is altogether a great game to check out before Flash players go out of style, and takes at least 20 minutes to complete. I’ll put a link to the game at the bottom of the page, if you’re interested!
Detective Grimoire
Secret of the Swamp
Now, ZOOM! Wow, it’s the future! The year 2014, a mere 5 whole years ago!
This sequel to the 2007 cult classic boasts some major improvements. A completely revamped UI, gorgeous stylized art and cutscenes, improved sound design, more voice acting, and a new ‘deduction’ mechanic, let’s call it. This mechanic is the previously mentioned fill-in-the-blanks type puzzle in which the player must use the evidence and information they have gathered to build up their conclusions in order to progress through their case.
The game also adds chapter titles to parse out sections of the game and some brand new deduction methods, like drawing pictures in your notebooks to produce theories, or more traditional environmental puzzles that require more than just solving a jigsaw puzzles or moving clutter (though those do reappear as well).
The artistic upgrades include painterly backdrops, lip syncing animations, and full-body animations for every fully-voiced characters, like Sally, the girl with green hair. And considering detectives games like this one require large amounts of writing to make even a short game like Detective Grimoire, which takes about 50 minutes to complete if you skip through the dialogue, I find that massively impressive.
Sally, pictured here.
New ‘deduction interface’, pictured here.
Tangle Tower
Oh hey, wow, look! It’s Detective Grimoire and…Sally?! With the green hair?! From the last game (and previous paragraph)?! No way!
Sooo pretty…I’m entranced.
Now, the title is what originally threw me for a loop. Detective Grimoire isn’t in the name! I tell ya, I spent a whole 10 minutes trying to figure this out before I even got to solving the game’s actual mystery. Well, more like a quick google search on the developers, but that’s still effort! Effort well spent, too, because I was more than eager to dive in to the detective game that in part inspired one of my own.
And it is a great murder mystery game with, like its predecessors, a colorful, stylized cast of characters, each with a wealth of interactions…and secrets! The environment holds more secrets than the previous Detective Grimoire games, that need to be revisited later on. Though this can sometimes be confusing for a player if they don’t realize they will gain info on it later on, more often than not there are dialogue cues to help the player move on and come back when they’ve learned more. And oh boy, somehow there are even more fantastic wordplay and witty writing.
The clause matching deduction system makes a return, along with even more challenging and thought-provoking puzzles. As we as some fun play-by-play scenes that depict events and movements of characters preceding the murder of the very map the player uses to get around.
This new addition follows closely in the footsteps of its 2014 predecessor, but adds some really neat innovations, updated character designs, and a brand-new mystery to solve!
What I Really Like, and What I’d Love to See…
The Detective Grimoire Games are Excellent Detective Games
Any fan of the Detective Grimoire games will praise them as ranking among the best detective games. But what makes a good detective game?
I believe there are some core requirements: an interesting mystery (more often than not a murder, in which there is a singular, hidden solution), the ability to interrogate and collect evidence/leads, and must be able to make the player think and feel like they are solving a mystery like a detective. To my knowledge, having an interrogation and an interactive narrative is possibly what distinguishes a detective video game from classic Clue type games.
What really sets Detective Grimoire apart from the crowd of games like LA Noire, Professor Layton, Sherlock Holmes games, or even Batman’s Arkham games is in the execution of puzzles and the methods of accruing and utilizing new information. Yes, you do look around for clues, but there is no ‘eagle-vision’ to reveal what’s important. And yes, you do interrogate suspects, but even that acts as a puzzle when they require you deduce what information they might be hiding.
It requires you to think, and makes it significantly harder but not impossible to power your way through puzzles. And as a result, that makes gaining new information and solving puzzles feel exceedingly rewarding. It makes you act like a detective, and leaves you to fill in the gaps.
What it looks like to question someone.
The ‘deduction interface’ as I am choosing to call it.
But It Always Leaves Me Wanting More
I can sit here typing about detective games all day, especially since they have always been my favorite kind of game. But I do take some fault with the Detective Grimoire games: there’s just not enough of them. I love that SFB Games has been making these games for so long, and that it’s been well-received enough to survive to this day. But each one has only ever focused on a single case, and leaves me hungry for another. With the first released in 2007, the next in 2014, and this year’s recent installment, new cases only seem to fall on Grimoire’s desk every 5 years or so. And each case is unrelated to the last, save for some recurring characters. What would be absolutely fantastic would be a version with multiple cases, and an overarching mystery that would build throughout to lead up to a big finish. Knowing the difficulty that comes in writing even an attempt at making an interactive mystery, I’m not going to pressure anybody to dive in to such an endeavor. But good golly, do I want to play THAT game!
Final Notes
Sorry if this week’s blog post is a bit more brief or sloppy than my previous installments. I am a sleep-deprived college student, steeped in midterm projects and exams, so this was a bit more last minute.
I would highly recommend trying out Tangle Tower, which is out on Apple Arcade, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. And as promised, here’s the link to the flash game that started it all:
http://armorgames.com/play/200/detective-grimoire
(this might not work if you’re browser doesn’t have flash player enabled)
SFB games also has made many more games that I absolutely love, like Haunt the House: Terrortown and Snipper Clips, so I am so surprised that it took me this long to find out about Detective Grimoire. Check this game out!
I give it two thumbs up!
Ally Weiss 