The Mermaid Mask Review: The Best Whodunnit of the Year

What it is

The Mermaid Mask is a hand-crafted point-and-click murder mystery from SFB Games, the two-brother outfit (Tom and Adam Vian) responsible for *Tangle Tower*, *Snipperclips* and 2024's cult horror hit *Crow Country*. It arrived on 16 July 2026 for PC, PS5, Switch and Switch 2, and costs €20.49 on Steam.

It is the third outing for detective Grimoire and his assistant Sally. The setup: Captain Mortuga is found dead beside an ancient cauldron inside a sealed room, aboard a submarine crewed entirely by people who had every reason to want him gone. Nobody could have got in. Somebody obviously did.

How it actually plays

If you know *Tangle Tower*, you know the shape of this. You wander a fixed set of hand-painted rooms, click on everything, collect physical clues that pop out as little 3D objects you can rotate in your hands, and then take those clues back to the suspects to watch their stories buckle. Interrogations are the meat of it. The puzzle-solving is mostly a matter of pairing the right evidence with the right lie.

What has genuinely improved is the writing and the staging. This is a fully voiced game and the cast is excellent - not "good for an indie", just good. The submarine is a superb setting, a cramped metal tube where you keep bumping into the same seven weirdos and slowly learn to read their tics. The score, performed by the Budapest Art Orchestra, does a lot of quiet work making a comedy game feel genuinely eerie when it needs to.

There is real craft here. Every drawer has a line of dialogue attached. Nothing is filler.

The highs

It is funny. Properly funny, in a dry way that most detective games attempt and fumble. And unlike a lot of adventure games that hide behind absurdity, the actual solution to this murder is fair, clean and satisfying - I worked out roughly half of it before the game told me, which is exactly the ratio you want. The final act reframes several earlier scenes without cheating.

Around eight to twelve hours for the main case, and it never sags.

The lows

My one real complaint: it is too generous. The game is so anxious that you might get stuck that it constantly nudges, confirms and congratulates. Grimoire frequently draws the conclusion out loud a beat before you would have. Deduction here is often less about reasoning and more about exhausting every dialogue option until the correct one lights up. Fans of harsher mysteries - *Return of the Obra Dinn*, *The Case of the Golden Idol* - will find this soft.

Also worth flagging: the text is localised into twelve languages, but voice acting is English only, and since the game is extremely talkative you will want a comfortable ear for it.

Verdict

This is the best thing SFB Games has made, and one of the most purely enjoyable adventure games I have played in years. It is warm, gorgeous, genuinely witty and mercifully free of padding. If it trusted its players a little more it would be flawless. Buy it anyway.

Score: 9/10

Image: George Chernilevsky / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Submarine_M-296_2016_G2.jpg