SFB Games sure have made a name for themselves. Between the survival horror throwback of Crow Country to the cosy co-op puzzler Snipperclips, this indie team got range. But they have been productive for a long while, making games during the heydays of Flash of various kinds. Their one series of games happened to be the point-and-click mystery adventures of Detective Grimoire.
And a new entry to the Detective Grimoire series is long overdue. Enter The Mermaid Mask.
SFB Games’ repertoire of making many games with decent success only to hit it big much further down the line reminds me of FromSoftware. Not saying that Crow Country is a successful hit as Dark Souls or Elden Ring. Rather, their willingness to still go back to a past, less popular series despite recent success is an admiral one. What I’m saying that The Mermaid Mask is like Armored Core VI, actually, in how there are parallels in these titles’ run-up to release.
As my first foray into the Detective Grimoire series, and someone who haven’t really gotten into whodunnit mystery investigation games, I found The Mermaid Mask to be enchanting, charming, and just the right amount of challenge. The Mermaid Mask won’t blow you away with smart mechanics or a mindblowing story, but the execution of it all is top mark, and that alone elevates what appears to be a familiar adventure into an exceptional one.
Presentation
The Mermaid Mask has a specific vibe nailed down to a T. The hand drawn backgrounds balances beauty and haunting. The characters feel alive despite their cartoony silhouettes thanks in part to excellent voice acting (more on that in a bit) and great use of canned animations applied only when needed. It can be whimsy, sad, slightly spooky and above else, very intriguing, guided by the game’s musical score and unexpected changes in presentation.
The restraint in scope of not making every little click to have an animation play, but absolutely go ham on basically one-off jokes that require custom art and assets that won’t appear again, is how you can tell that a master chef of a game developer team is cooking this: they know how to scope and only spending time and effort on something impactful.
When they do put the extra effort, they don’t really have to, but they can, and they’re flexing to let you know they can. This is simply my headcanon which I chose to believe, but I bet some of those were simply borne out of a “would it be funny?” bit during a design meeting and everyone just locked in and execute on the joke, like how a bunch of New York youths in a frat house joked about Mehran’s Steakhouse on Google Map reviews. And you know what, the few comedic bits The Mermaid Mask has is funny thanks to how much effort was done to sell those jokes.
For fans of Crow Country who adore the low-poly 3D models, The Mermaid Mask has a way of sneaking in that aesthetic, used to visualise each suspect’s given witness statement of the murder to the detectives. A neat way of visualising the murder crime in the murder submarine.
The Mermaid Mask has quite the elaborate soundtrack, maybe too much. The orchestral arrangement are all moody and nice, but the more whimsy tracks can feel… distracting. I appreciate that each suspect basically has their own theme song, some loops are much nicer to hear during long conversations or while ruminating the case file to inspect the clues. I often feel like going to another room or immediately talk to another person so that the more overwhelming songs stop playing and I can hear myself think again. Still, the execution of the songs themselves I don’t have issue with, it’s just that it can be too much of a tonal shift that distracts from the whole detective mystery vibe the game has got going for.
The voicing of the cast of The Mermaid Mask really elevates this game to another level. The natural-sounding dialogue makes it easier to feel acquainted with Grimoire, Sally and the peculiar guests of the Mortuga Submarine. I know nothing of the two detectives and their past adventures, but it wasn’t long to get a feel of their relationship as co-workers who don’t necessarily get along but familiar enough with each other to riff and banter, and the voice talents’ performance sells it. You, the observer from the fourth wall, can feel the sarcasm when one of them incites it, just like how it comes across the party receiving that.
But it gets better. The way the character pronounce words is even played for laughs. In the introduction, I picked up immediately how Grimoire says “buoy” like a “boy” but not Sally (who says it like a “boo-ey”). Somehow that specific pronunciation becomes a setup for a pun, and later a point of banter between the co-detectives.
I don’t how the localisers for other language translate these sorts of wordplays, but they’re plentiful, and genuinely punny. And if it’s a lame pun, there’s usually an audience in the room to push it back. As expected, Sally was not into it.
Yes, The Mermaid Mask can get quippy, but thankfully you’ll only find them mostly on the non-critical path, as the game takes its murder mystery seriously with only a few jokes and gags to alleviate the tension. The silly wordplay doesn’t downplay the stakes at play, simply an alleviation to attract your attention to some spiffy alliteration when nothing of import is happening.
Overall, I find The Mermaid Mask presents itself immaculately. It’s a cutesy-looking murder mystery that’s inviting and cosy while not making light of the murder at hand. This is still a serious crime investigation, even if involves a cast of anachronistic characters that spans from Victorian magician to Hollywood star, on board of a mishmash of a submarine and ship.
Gameplay
In The Mermaid Mask, detective duo Grimoire and Sally are off to solve a murder case nearby Silkwirm-on-sea. Captain Mortuga of the Mortuga Submarine is found dead in a locked room with a slash cut to the neck but with no murder weapon. A curious case makes more curious as the sub is home to quite a ragtag of characters, all of which are suspects. So off you go exploring the murder submarine, gather clues, solve puzzles, and question the suspects.
Sounds simple enough. But of course, the case unfolds into a weave of interesting happenings, though only some of these competing leads are directly tied to murder.
The Mermaid Mask is a point-and-click adventure, even on consoles. If you’re playing on a PS5, you have the option to use the touchpad as a mouse (with mixed results, the touchpad of the DualSense, and the DualShock 4 for that matter, just doesn’t make sense for mouse-like inputs), use motion controls (which works well, but the controller is heavy for one-handed use where this input would feel more intuitive), or regular old Destiny cursor style input.
I am of the opinion that Switch Joy-Con would be a much better input device for this sort of games, in particular the motion control one. But all the options here are fine. The normal input is pretty good too. Like a Destiny cursor in Destiny would, there’s an input acceleration curve happening as it’s easy enough to delicately move the cursor in short distances, and not too twitchy when having to glide the cursor across the screen. Though I would prefer it to be a teeny bit faster on longer movement, but as it is, it works fine enough.
I do mean it when I say The Mermaid Mask is a point-and-click adventure. Just in the introduction chapter alone, every little curio has a unique enough description (fully voiced, by the way) that invites players to keep a keen eye and click on anything seemingly interesting. Grimoire and Sally are good at sussing out what’s important to the investigation and what’s just there for flavour, enough to clue you in what’s what. Even if it’s not important, you get a joke or pun or some witty banter between the two, so it’s worth clicking anything remotely peculiar.
The first part of the game, you’ll be roaming about the Mortuga Submarine, clicking on just about everything, and asking the suspects about what happened. From there, you start building your case file with clues and statements. When enough of them are gathered, you can start a Suspicion segment where you add up all the knowledge you gather and push a suspect into revealing something they’ve deliberately kept conspicuous from their initial statement.
The Open Case Too Wide
The Mermaid Mask lets you roam freely to do this, and it’s an interesting challenge that I’m not sure the developers are entirely successful in tackling, but I see they tried what they can. By keeping most of the game open-ended, you can gather clues and find leads in any order, so every dialogue related to these clues must stand on their own. You never know if that’s the first clue which the player picks up on a specific new info, or maybe they missed the first one that should’ve revealed that knowledge so maybe the next clue is more obvious.
The worse case can happen is when you ask the same person all the clues you have in one sitting, and you start seeing the same revelation with a similar reaction by the suspect. There’s a suspect who makes fun of you for finding out what they think is a simple deduction, and they respond more or less the same for another clue. Jarring when you see these set of conversations back-to-back.
Another flaw of The Mermaid Mask’s open-endedness is that there are so many subplots to keep track of. You can’t focus on one strain and follow its lead. And if you’re playing in sessions with big breaks in between, good luck trying to remember all the puzzle pieces of the murder mystery.
Maybe this is just me armchair game designing without the knowledge and experience of how it would actually entail, but if you actually get to build the case with a pegboard of connections to better visualise all the different discrepancies, that would work better for a murder mystery with at least eight different subplots unfolding.
As it is, you have to make a mental note, or jog down and make actual notes, of what is going on, and form a case on what each suspect has to hide. Some are very obvious, some require you to pay more attention to. Personally, I find the suspicion of the actor Dirk Dansom to be very straightforward, I figured out what his deal is in my head easily. But the opposite goes to the self-styled “Dream Doctor” Dr. Zephyr, who I just guess what part of his story was not adding up without really understanding them from the clues provided before.
All the information gathering culminates into Suspicion, a linear check to see if you’ve deduced and figured out what’s going on. Grimoire and Sally go back and forth presenting the case and unfold what truly transpired, to the suspect’s grimace. That aforementioned check is a knowledge check, whereby you fill in the blanks with the correct statement. It’s a multiple-choice affair, so you can brute force it, though some suspicion moments do require you to pull out the right clue, and even hone in to highlight what specific part of the clue that bolster your claim, making use of the new-to-the-series 3D modelled clues.
This is all fun when you have it all figured out, you can enjoy some of the out-of-pocket choices available, but if you missed or forgotten some details, well, it’s just an unfun sequence of brute-force guessing where anything makes sense.
Later in the game, these suspicion cases get more tough due to the increased amount of clues on screen. It’s optimally better to remember what clues were highlighted in the suspicion tab before you begin the suspicion sequence, which feels like cheesing. The highs you want from playing a detective game, as I’d like to believe who last played a detective game was Type Help and before that Freddy Fish 3, is from piecing together the case yourself by careful and clever deduction. I could be wrong, of course, as I’m not entirely familiar with the genre and its players’ expectations of it.
This again reinforces me that having an in-game pegboard to let players try and solve it before attempting to present it to a suspect would be cool. At least you can visualise the case before presenting it to the suspect, so the player is in line with Grimoire and Sally of having it all figured out.
That being said, The Mermaid Mask does what it can to give a gentle nudge and pull to the right direction. Hints are on by default, and any failed or incorrect guesses will have a gentle tell off. It even tells you if you’re close, or using the right clue at the wrong time, so it’s neat. I thought having the hints on all the time might be too hand-holdy, but you’ll need it when you do those suspicion sequences. Each clue gets a summary of all the info you glean from suspects you’ve shown it to, the jokey, trivial ones removed so it’s all important info. Though there are blindspots to the hints.
A Hint Too Short
There are two stumble blocks that I find slightly hampered my experience with The Mermaid Mask, and the first is how clues are interacted with. Most of them are fine as they are self-contained, whatever you need to find are all within that same clue. Interact with it, spot the details here and there, and you’re good. But there’s at least two clues where it unlocks something found in another clue.
To use a vague and non-spoiler example, think of a CD player, which includes a CD in it. And then you’d find another CD down the line hidden in another clue which, naturally, means that you need to use said CD on the CD player you already have. The Mermaid Mask doesn’t do “use-X-on-Y” interactions like an old point-and-click adventure game. It’s for the better—as funny as it is for a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle to be used a zipline in The Secret Of Monkey Island, how the heck would someone who don’t speak English as well to have guess what a pulley is and how it works without enough context? Tangent aside, not having a “use-X-on-Y” interaction means some players (like me) will not notice that you can go back to the CD player and spot a new button where it says, hey, press this to use that new CD you found. I feel stupid because A) it’s obvious at how big said button is, but also B) I’ve seen another device that behaves like this before and instantly got it, but not this other one. It becomes a problem when that one clue that I didn’t explore fully and forgot has no indicator or hint leading to it. The clue count will say you found all the clues. The hints are too vague in what you should be inspecting in your case files. Again, I only figure it out by looking at the suspicion tab, see the highlight clues, and only then found that I didn’t check all the clues in full. I genuinely thought I was softlocked for some reason.
The other problem is the standalone puzzles. Well, outside of a particular one that requires some note-taking but these puzzles require you to solve logical mechanics that only appears within the confines of these standalone sequences. These are progression blockers in that usually an important clue is the reward in completing these.
Most of these are brilliant brain teasers. The best of these puzzles are when the hints don’t necessarily give away the solution, but just enough information to figure out the logic behind it. But the worst of these puzzles are also when the hints don’t necessarily give away the solution, but just enough information to figure out the logic behind it. So you’re stuck rotating this thing that, again for non-spoiler reasons, I will vaguely describe as a Rubik’s Cube in that some people would just rotate and twist and rotate and twist it and could never get the intended shape and colour to appear even if it’s supposed to be solvable within seconds if you know exactly how to twist it. At least there’s only one of that style of puzzle.
From a gameplay standpoint, The Mermaid Mask doesn’t quite well make you feel like a competent detective, and doesn’t quite set you up for success even if there are attempts to make the clues, hints and specific info that reveals more of the mystery obvious. The puzzles can be a hit-or-miss, though with more hits than misses thankfully.
But it is relaxing to go around, clicking everything in a room to see if it’s a clue or a conversation Grimoire and Sally has as flavour. The sense of adventure and mystery is there. And when you do get the idea of what’s going on, it does feel good to figure out the murder and the many twists and turns it took to get there.
Content
I finished The Mermaid Mask in 13 hours, though you could complete it much faster. It’s definitely a one-and-done game where you play through a weekend or two (preferably in one session, due to the issues I mentioned previously with clue tracking).
The way the plot of The Mermaid Mask is satisfying to witness. Once the wide path of questioning the eight different characters converges into its epic conclusion, the murder makes so much sense, and the characters you meet all have their arcs concluded in some ways.
And the characters, oh boy the characters. There are eight main suspects on board of the Mortuga Submarine, and they all appear a bit peculiar in a fun way.
The supposed Captain Seafoam being a teen girl who’s now in charge after Mortuga’s death. The curious magician Symmetry Silkmoth and her penchant for flowery phrases and optical illusions. The dashing Dirk Dansom and his Johnny Bravo-esque physique but not too cone-headed as the trope he derives from suggest. The grouchy J.D. Wirman who has a long history with the town nearby the submarine. The cool and strong Madam Tadpole who you can’t tell if she wants to call you a friend or snap you in half. Dr. Zephyr whose endeavours in oneirology has the presence of a studied scholar despite the questionable field of study. The chirpy Godrick Gripp and his trusty cane with a face he talks to regularly. And the wandering historian Miriam Moon who happens to arrive just before Mortuga’s death and likes to talk while having a tobacco pipe in her mouth. Those eight, alongside Mortuga and an extended cast of characters related to the core eight suspects (plus Mortuga) are a memorable bunch. Their specific knowledge or expertise will lead you to new leads on the case, though show them some objects and they’ll go all quiet or deflective.
But really, between the distinctive shapes each of the cast is (some even have three fingers and a thumb, like old cartoon characters), the terrific voice acting that includes a mix of American and British English speakers, and the excellent writing that makes quips and puns natural, are what really made The Mermaid Mask such a pleasure to experience.
Yes, there are lampshades and allusions to the 4th wall, so for those who might not be into ironic comedy or have totally lost all of its joy sapped from watching too much Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, the writing might not resonate with you, you might even be averse of it. But if you can tolerate a little wordplay or two and enjoy the natural-sounding conversations (I truly believe some of these quips can be pulled off in real conversations when you have at least two witty detectives), you’ll find the story of The Mermaid Mask a memorable one.
The big reveal at the of The Mermaid Mask is great. The resolution to the events satisfying. And it’s all self-contained with maybe a few loose connections to the wider Detective Grimoire series, which even without full context still doesn’t make a new audience feel excluded.
Personal Enjoyment
I’m not really a mystery, detective game kind of guy myself. Only dabbled with a few of such titles here and there. The fact that if you put a gun to my head and ask what’s my favourite detective video game and the answer to that being Freddy Fish 3 should explain as much. But I was in the mood for such a game after recently discovering Type Help due to the release of a new PC game based on that free text adventure.
I had some pain points with The Mermaid Mask which I’ve explained already: not being able to mentally map all the details of the case and the many subplots that are unraveling alongside the murder is a bummer. There are unintended progression blockers that really wasted my time. And this game is something you have to play from start to finish with as little gap between sessions as possible to avoid any friction from forgetting some key details that doesn’t seem important before, but becomes more so later.
But the writing and worldbuilding of The Mermaid Mask makes it still worth my time. I enjoy discovering Grimoire and Sally for the first time and see how they handle a case. Their dynamic, like how they can play either the straight one or the funny in any bit of convo, or both being able to be the brunt of the other’s sassy snippy comment while still finding common ground between them on occasions, is itself I found to be refreshing dynamic. The duo’s dynamic dynamic, if you will.
The Mortuga Submarine is one fascinating setting. The wider world outside of what we see through the case, is just as intriguing as you get a glimpse of what Silkwirm was like before it became a ghost town, and how ruthless the movie industry is just like our world. The suspects, some of which are old-timey pastiches, are way too peculiar in their own way to really tell who out of all them are a murderer. The Mermaid Mask can feel grounded yet also be surreal at times. And the balance where the oddness of the world doesn’t take away from the serious groundedness that makes a murder not some trivial act, is worth applause.
I walk away from The Mermaid Mask not necessarily as a whodunnit mystery fan, but a growing appreciation of creating a world that is believable enough to have the unbelievable, and the tandem work between a good script and good voice performance to really sell a story well. That attention to detail, which may not have contribute directly to the betterment of its core gameplay, is the sauce any game needs. A good sauce elevates a passable plate of sotong goreng tepung (flour-battered fried calamari rings) into a great appetiser. The Mermaid Mask, as they say, has that sauce.
It’s great bravery for SFB Games that had found success in their latest big swing of games only to return to the series they cut their teeth to. The Mermaid Mask might not be the big follow-up to Crow Country some might expect, but at least it’s nice to see that this indie team is out here making games, as opposed to bigger game development teams that are out here to make money. I wish for a world where games like The Mermaid Mask can find its audience, be appreciated, and simply exist. And I think us gamers should from time to time venture out of our comfort zone and discover new experiences, just to see the breadth of this artform.
Plus, as a speaker of English as a second language, I learned a few words I never come across thanks to The Mermaid Mask, like I would playing adventure games back in the days when adventure games were humongous, so that’s cool too.
Verdict
The Mermaid Mask is a solid detective mystery romp that rewards you with a fascinating story to unfold and funny yet real fun conversation with its cast of suspected murderers. The murder itself is taken seriously and treated with the gravitas it deserves, but the wider world of Detective Grimoire has a bit of that whimsy that most game sorely lacks today. The core gameplay won’t hook you in, but the loveable cast, well-told story with a rewarding resolution and fun little puzzles it sprinkles, will.
Even if you never played a Detective Grimoire game, or not a big mystery or detective game fan, The Mermaid Mask is worth a peek if you’re curious and interested in a different kind of point-and-click adventure.
Played on PS5. Review key provided by the developers.
The Mermaid Mask
Even if you never played a Detective Grimoire game, or not a big mystery or detective game fan, The Mermaid Mask is worth a peek if you're curious and interested in a different kind of point-and-click adventure.
- Presentation 9.5
- Gameplay 7.5
- Content 9
- Personal Enjoyment 8