It may not look like it at a glance, but making anything about detectives is not an easy feat. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, book, TV series or, in this case, a videogame, there are so many factors to take into account. You need a cast of interesting characters, leaving enough clues for the audience to spin who is the culprit without it being too obvious.

By giving direct control to the player for the clue order and the pacing they find them, it can cause that the game feels slow, heavy and tedious. This is something that I’ve noticed a lot, even in those many consider “the best in their genre”. In summary, if the game starts to frustrate me with obtuse clues and without a clear direction, the chances that I drop it are big.

However, The Mermaid Mask doesn’t get in that box. This is an excellent mystery game that not only has an interesting narrative with endearing and charismatic characters, It also keeps you wanting to see more thanks to its eccentricity, humor, voice performances and visual style. Although I was already looking forward to it, I really didn’t expect it to become into one of the favorites of 2026.

The Mermaid Mask is the fourth entry in the Detective Grimoire series, which it was created during the golden age of Flash games, however it’s not a requirement to have played the previous ones to understand this new one, thought it does have a few references to Tangle Tower , their previous game.

This mystery takes place inside a submarine named “The Mortuga Submarine” and its captain, Magnus Mortuga, has been assasinated in a bizarre way, inslide a small and very enclosed room. To resolve the mystery, the new captain calls Detective Grimoire alongside his assistant Sally, delving into what slowly becomes a really strange murder. To find the culprit, our protagonists will have to explore the ship and talk to its peculiar inhabitants, getting to know them, how they ended up there, and what secrets they hide.

If I want to sell the game to all of you, I should first mention the aspect that impacted me the most out of the whole experience: the visual style. They made a phenomenal job making that each scenario gives you that weird vibe that they were looking for, and that each character feel really expresive with a few movements. This last one in particular was the one that captured me the most out of the whole package, the way they use a quite limited animation method, to give it a level of expression unlike anything else, taking advantage of the use of eye / eyebrows / mouth sets that change depending on the words that the character is saying, as well as the design of these.

But this wouldn’t work if those character weren’t interesting taking into consideration the type of story they want to tell, and SFB Games does not dissapoint in that regard. Each of them has a very unique and unusual personality, making it not so easy to point to the “rarest” person as the suspect, because everyone is weird. For example, we can encounter Zephyr, a very peculiar doctor specialized in dream science, as well as an interest in cursed objects; or Madam Tadpole, an Olympic swimmer with the appeareance of a fish. As I said, each of them is so different and interesting, that throughout the story you get attached to them and want to listen to everything they have in mind.

And the keyword here is “listen”, because if you thought that The Mermaid Mask hasn’t done enough, that’s because I haven’t mentioned another of the aspects that make it so memorable: the excelent work that went into the voice performances. All the actors and actresses put everything of themselves into their characters, infusing them with life and personality unlike anything else. Of my favorites in performance I think it would be the author J.D. Wirman, which sells you very well the idea of being someone very talented and smart, but being prisioner of the expectations that the world has put over him; Mariana Moon, who has this mysterious vibe but in a very friendly way; or Symmetry Silkmoth, a very timid and shy girl, that has a very special gift for magic and the paranormal.

That is what shines out the most from the game, all the charisma that is present in all its aspects. Not to say that nothing else is good, of course not, but I stayed hours and hours playing non-stop because I wanted to see what all the characters had to say, how their personalities helped solve the mystery alongside a humor that constantly grabbed me by surprise, with hypnotic animations, very ingenious puzzles that ask you to consider all possibilites without feeling unfair, and excelent hand-drawn backgrounds that perfectly capture how eccentric the submarine is, creating an experince unlike anything else.

Veredict

While I do have some problems regarding the Spanish translation and a stuttering issue at the end, this game truly surpassed my expectations and became one of my favorite games of 2026, to the point that part of its visual style is being an inspiration for my upcoming projects, which is something that not many games have managed to do. I’m very excited to see what SFB Games will do next, because I have the certainty that it’s going to be phenomenal once again.

Tier List placement: S
Played on PC | Key provided by the publisher