Review: The Mermaid's Mask (Switch 2) - A Stylish Mystery That's All Killer, No Filler

SFB Games’ Detective Grimoire series has gone from strength to strength as it has plotted its course from flash game to iOS to consoles. This time, the sleuthing twosome, Sally and Grimoire, arrive on Switch 2 with The Mermaid Mask, putting a fresh new murder mystery straight into your hands.

It’s a classic setup: a pair of detectives arrive at a small seaside town to investigate a confounding crime. One Captain Mortuga has apparently been killed on his submarine in inexplicable circumstances. A motley grab bag of suspects inhabit the boat, improbably including a psychic, a body builder, a famous author and more.

The game, then, is in the form of one big puzzle. Although you will explore environments and collect items, this is not an unravelling story in the style of a traditional point-and-click adventure. It’s more of a web of facts and happenings and versions of events that need to be explored and pieced together. It brings a little taste of deduction from Case of the Golden Idol, a sprinkling of vibrant irreverence from Lost in Play, and a pinch of Monkey Island’s playful cynicism. That’s a tasty cocktail.

The single-screen sets and absence of your player characters from the picture let this examine-and-deduce gameplay shine. You have a series of fixed dioramas to pore over, contemplating and information-gathering. Some rooms on the submarine are home to other characters – suspects simply by virtue of their presence – and they will hang around patiently until you are ready to interview them.

Having combed the scene, conversations reveal more facts to collect, and culminate in a witness testimony, illustrated with chibi 3D animation against a notepaper background, reporting the movements of the suspect and how they interacted with others on the boat. Everything is perfectly set up to support mystery-solving. The Mermaid Mask knows what it wants to be, and everything about the main gameplay works to support a consistent vision.

That said, the whole is still made up of its parts. While the overarching mystery is a satisfyingly intricate puzzle, there are smaller challenges along the way that sometimes feel a bit tacked-on. When the workings of the world are so carefully built out, it does puncture the atmosphere to have to unlock a phone through an unlikely logic test, or arrange caps on bottles to miraculously make a bookcase open. For what they are, those smaller brain-teasers are fun enough, but they’re lightweight compared to the bigger prize.

The game has also clearly been designed with a pointer in mind. There’s no clever adaptation to controller-based play, meaning you’ll need to pick from four ways to move a cursor: with a control stick, with Wii-style Joy-Con movement, with your finger straight onto the screen or, of course, with Switch 2’s mouse mode.

It’s probably no surprise that the mouse and the finger are the winners here. If you can manage the ergonomics of the Joy-Con mouse then I found that to be the best way to play when docked. In handheld, I’m normally a bit of a touchscreen sceptic, but here the touch targets are big, inviting and well spaced out. Some move-the-pieces-around puzzles felt especially natural and tactile in this mode.

Since it’s always pointer-based, there is the risk of pixel-hunting – just clicking everything to find out what’s important – but I soon got the feel for what was interactive and what wasn’t, making for low-friction play that lets the colourful investigation take centre stage.

And colourful it certainly is. Characters are presented with modern, comic-book-style graphics, energetically animated and drawing from rich and varied palettes. Backgrounds, while still lively and fun, make some concession to functionality, grounding your examination in logic and not interpretation of overly stylised still lifes.

Clues you collect – objects from the scenes – are represented in 3D and can be rotated to explore them. It’s a little frustrating that the visual presentation can get ahead of the gameplay here: you can see something’s up with an item but can’t interact with it until a dialogue reveals what you could already see. Nonetheless, the models are intriguing enough to be worth giving them all a spin before clicking away.

Layered on top of this careful presentation is a suitably atmospheric score. Moving from room to room, the music floats from the creepy to the sweet to the melancholy. Selecting items with the cursor provides a satisfying but unobtrusive thunk.

The shortish playing time – a handful of hours – makes everything feel lavish. There’s no filler, so little time for repeated animations or spoken lines to get tired. Realised with excellent vocal performances, the characters are not just static cut-outs, but a band of expressive, dynamic personas with an engaging range of animations. Conversations also flow together at a great pace without stuttering around button presses. Overall, dialogue feels less like clicking through a visual novel and more like watching a fluid animated film.

Conclusion

The Mermaid Mask finds a brilliantly entertaining niche between deduction game and point-and-click. The tangled mystery of the death of Captain Mortuga is full of compelling twists and every suspect adds a surprise along the way. Some tacked-on logic puzzles slightly break the dramatic flow, but not enough to undo the magic of a well-constructed puzzle box of a game.