Deep vs. Shallow Mystery Games
A framework for classifying mystery games based on content, not genre
Let's get started with some big news: Steam has announced an official Steam Detective Fest for 2026! Steam had previously hosted a Mystery Fest in 2023, so it's great to see another fest for mystery-themed games coming up soon!
The Steam Detective Fest will run from January 12 to January 19. Developers will have until January 12 to register for the event. If you're a mystery gamedev and your game qualifies, you should seriously consider joining for the visibility!
Here's what Steam considers to be eligible:
Eligible games will feature one or more mysteries that serve as the primary focus or gameplay loop of the game.
These games are likely to include:
Clues to be 'found' or deduced via mini-game or puzzle
Some kind of deduction process - it's not enough to solve each mini-game or only gather the clues, the player must 'put it together' in the end somehow.
A notebook where the player can review the clues they've gained so far
Multiple ways of acquiring clues - interviewing suspects/witnesses, taking a closer look at specific parts of the crime scene, etc.
Eligible games will be easily identifiable as a detective game first and foremost - games that feature a big mystery but the player is not actively solving for it are not eligible.
I really wish I had saved the criteria for Steam Mystery Fest back in 2023, because I've spent so much time trying to distinguish between what is a mystery game and what's not. Technically, there has to be a difference between Mystery games and Detective games. But for Detective games, I would absolutely agree with the above criteria.
This brings us to the main topic of today's discussion — which incidentally overlaps a lot with trying to define “what qualifies as a mystery game.”
I've previously talked about how it can be difficult to tell what is or is not a mystery game based on Steam tags alone. When I write articles covering specific mystery games or when I aggregate statistics about them, I usually have no choice but to go item by item, opening up each store page and manually checking to see if it meets my personal definition.
As you can imagine, that process takes an excessively long amount of time. Even spending 1 minute per page just to look at the trailer, screenshots, description, and reviews results in hours spent solely on research.
How Steam Tags Work (Or Don’t)
When a developer publishes a store page on Steam, the developer can choose a set number of tags that they believe represent their game the best. But Steam users — regardless of whether or not the game is out, or even if they’ve purchased the game — can also add tags.
While I'm sure that feature was made with good intentions, it can often result in users inappropriately tagging games. For example, my own game Detective Butler was incorrectly tagged with “Resource Management”, “Female Protagonist”, “Nudity”, and even more — and I didn't even notice this for years!!!
So, it's entirely likely that non-mystery games are being applied with mystery game tags, or in some rare cases that real mystery games are being loaded with other tags that knock the mystery tags off the search list. The good news is that devs do have the ability to modify the tags at any time and remove those false tags from their game — but it's always going to be a constant struggle.
It also doesn't help that there are no obvious definitions for each tag. I managed to find some definitions on SteamDB, but I'm not sure if those are officially defined by Steam. Even if they were, I doubt anyone reads them. When customers apply tags, it's both subjective in terms of "Does this game fit the criteria for this tag?" but also "What does this tag even mean?"
So it can be really difficult to accurately tag games, even when you have the best of intentions.
Steam Tags for Mystery Games
Here are the 3 main tags you should check for when looking for mystery games on Steam:
Detective
Investigation
Mystery
But as I just mentioned, those tags aren't always accurate. We can really see this when we filter for each tag, while excluding games from tags we've previously seen:
The Detective tag is usually the best — primarily featuring games that test your detective skills through gameplay — but can often include abstract puzzle games that lack story, or games that happen to feature a detective character solving a crime.
The Investigation tag emphasize physical exploration in an environment while de-emphasizing the solving of a defined mystery.
The Mystery tag is a catch-all for games that lack physical exploration or a traditional detective mechanic, but where the story or atmosphere contains a large degree of uncertainty, though the game's actual mechanics might have little to do with solving any mysteries. For example, Higurashi is tagged as Mystery without being tagged as Detective or Investigation.
Beyond those three, there are additional tags that are sometimes worth checking out for edge cases:
The Crime and Heist tags are primarily aimed at showing the crime or heist from the player's perspective (i.e., actually being the criminal). But sometimes, when the mystery game is about solving a crime, these tags are applied too.
The Escape Game and Social Deduction tags are for those specific mystery subgenres. Due to the relatively small number of games released across both subgenres, the tags tend to be accurate.
So when I'm looking for mystery games, I usually start with the Detective tag, and then I go down the list like so.
Problems with Tags
But this isn't a perfect system. There's a massive difference between a death game, an ontological mystery, and a battle of wits. I know these are niche genres, but there's still not a good way to track them on Steam. Perhaps more importantly, there's no real way to discern whether a game is actually about a mystery, or only uses mystery as a hook to lure people in.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
I've had to look at literally thousands of store pages, whether it’s for writing these articles or building our own mystery game database. And I often see descriptions on the store pages saying things like, "You are a detective investigating a mystery in an abandoned house", but once you load up the game it turns out there is no real story or characters — other than the monster chasing you down the corridor. That's a Horror game disguised as a Mystery game, and it happens a lot.
A different example might be Hidden Object games (often tagged as "Detective") where you need to look at a static image and find all of the things in the scene. That's not what most of us are looking for when we're searching for Detective games. Some Hidden Object games have you playing as a detective character supposedly investigating a crime — should those count, too? After all, observation mechanics are pretty similar to what you'd be doing when searching for evidence in a mystery game, right? (Steam Detective Fest circumvents these questions by hosting a distinct Hidden Object Fest at a different time).
A third example is a blend of the two genres: Anomaly games. A very popular genre as of late, it combines ambient horror with the observation skills of Hidden Object games, though still not to the extent of solving a full mystery. Like a scary version of "spot the difference", these games ask you to pay close attention while being afraid of what you might find. Despite the detective skills embedded in the mechanics, the true appeal is horror, not mystery.
So my concern is that there are many genuine mystery games not being found because of these tags, and many games pretending to be mysteries (or at least, bordering on mystery) being found instead.
It gets even more confusing when you factor in so-called Crime games. Games like Among Us sometimes require the player to commit the crime just so other players can solve it, but it’s not tagged Crime. Or the game Overboard! prominently features in its store description: "GET AWAY WITH MURDER" while not being tagged Crime and instead being tagged Detective. If a game like Overboard! (where you try to get away with the crime) is considered a mystery game, then why isn't the massively popular "crime simulator" Schedule I a mystery game too?
And what about games where the player is given moral choices to either commit a crime, or to defect and help solve it? Moral choices where you choose to be the good guy or the bad guy are some of the most iconic mechanics in roleplaying games. Mystery games often force the player to choose between two morally dubious choices and pick the lesser of two evils. The outcome is shaped by what you believe is the morally right thing to do, and that's a kind of freedom you can only experience in video games.
Mystery Breadth vs. Mystery Depth
Now, I've written previously that a mystery game is a game where the story is the puzzle. That unique combination is what draws people to the genre: you're not just reading a story and you're not just solving meaningless puzzles. But even with that definition, it seems like there are varying "degrees" of mystery game.
Here's my best attempt to organize those "degrees" into a framework that makes sense — especially for mystery game developers.
