Detective Grimoire is, like many Indie adventure games I've played over the years, a recommendation that came from former mod, current book-writing guy, and perennial forum wiseacre @sparky_buzzsaw. The guy has good taste in adventure games, at least of the traditional point-and-click variety, and while I have some misgivings about Detective Grimoire it turned out to be time well spent. But hey, let's not start a mystery with its conclusion.

Detective Grimoire is a comedic whodunnit that has players talk to suspects, gather clues, and figure out the whys and hows behind a grisly murder. Its eponymous protagonist is recruited to determine the killer of a tourist attraction owner in the middle of a swamp known for a cryptid nicknamed "Boggy" that would later become the basis of a mini-empire of merchandizing and animated fiction. The swamp, however, only contains a handful of people of varying levels of suspicion, including a self-obsessed film director and his cameraman, the local café proprietor and gift shop clerk who were employed by the victim, a hermit woman living in a treehouse, a stuffy environmentalist protester who everyone mostly ignores, and an annoying bookworm who has set himself up in the swamp's museum. Oh, and Boggy, but it's likely he doesn't even exist. Unfortunately, Boggy is also the prime suspect from the evidence left at the crime scene, and it's down to Grimoire (and the player) to figure out who the true culprit is.

In some respects the game is a standard point-and-click adventure game: you click on things, you talk to people, you solve a handful of basic Layton-style puzzles (the game makes sure to reference "the top hat guy" in case you didn't get it). You're also required, often, to interpret the information you've recently been given in order to create a "challenge": an opportunity to present a suspect with potentially damning evidence and force them to give you the real scoop. Each NPC has one of these challenges, and they involve correctly answering a set of multiple choice questions and presenting the right pieces of evidence at the right times. There is also the denouement, a trademark of detective fiction, where you take everything you've learned and piece it all together to create a compelling case against the murderer.

The game definitely has a surfeit of charm. For one, the protagonist and those he encounters have some fun sarcastic dialogue, with the player choosing between three openers that offer what are essentially inconsequential jokes to set the tone for the rest of the conversation. The art direction's great, and the interface with its large icons was clearly developed with touch controls in mind: after all, Detective Grimoire began as an iOS and Android game before coming to Steam (though if we're being technical, it actually started as a free Flash game that was expanded to become a commercial product). The game's voice-acting is generally stellar - I didn't even notice Arin "EgoRaptor" Hanson had voiced two of the characters until the credits rolled, so he's evidently been improving his craft - and the game stores all its found information in moderately easy to navigate menus for simple referral.

However, there's also the fact that the game takes about 90 minutes to complete, or maybe two hours if you bother to acquire every single piece of data on all the clues, suspects and areas of the game through diligently clicking everywhere and asking everyone about everything. It seems clear from the way the game ends that it's meant to be an opening chapter to a greater mystery series that will take Grimoire and his companions to many more locations than just the swamp. We've seen this before with Indie games on a restrictive budget: rather than skimp on presentation and mechanics for a lesser product, they create a short first "episode" with what funds they have and use the revenue from that to finance later adventures following the same blueprint. It's now been three years since Detective Grimoire came out, so I'm hoping a bigger and better sequel is just around the corner. For as slight and brief as this gumshoe game is, it has potential in (Sam) spades.

Rating: 4 out of 5.