Looking Ahead: 5 Mystery Game Subgenres for 2025
Based on a year of analyzing new and upcoming mystery games
Happy Mystery Monday!
You might remember our previous article on the top 5 mystery subgenres, where I covered the most popular and well-known types of mystery games.
I spent a lot of time this year discovering and playing all kinds of new and upcoming mystery games, and it really opened my mind to a world of possibilities.
These games have taken previously-existing mystery subgenres and expanded upon them in creative ways.
While some of these games are explicitly labeled as mystery games, others are not, despite the fact that they share very similar qualities and generally appeal to the same kinds of people.
Mystery games, as we have defined here numerous times, are games where the story is a puzzle. Another way to phrase it is that your goal is to uncover information about a narrative and reconstruct the truth. In order to do that, you need to have logical deduction and critical thinking skills, and use them to analyze the story.
When we think of stories, we generally think of text — but in video games, a story can be told through visuals, environments, and much more. The medium of video games gives us many more ways to experience and solve mysteries than books or movies ever can, and as the video game genre evolves, we should update our understanding of the mystery genre accordingly.
As long as we are using our brains to piece together the narrative elements of a game — plot, characters, setting, and so on — then I consider that to be a mystery game.
Going forward into 2025 and beyond, I really think the following genres will continue to grow, and they will expand to become more popular than ever before, so you should definitely keep an eye on them.
1. Hacking Simulation Games
The primary means of interactivity in this genre is via a fully functional computer system. Your goal is to uncover information using this system — such as reading documents, watching videos, and communicating via chats — to solve some kind of mystery, whether acting as a special agent or vigilante hacker.
This genre can be seen as a modern extension of the Detective Game genre, featuring current-day and/or futuristic technology. These games may also incorporate aspects of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, digital forensics, and computer programming.
Examples:
2. Language Deciphering Games
The primary objective of this kind of game is to piece together an unknown and/or fictional language in order to understand the truth — or even just the story itself.
However, the language is not simply taught to you — logical deduction and critical thinking are necessary to figure it out yourself.
These games are really about cryptography and deciphering coded messages, which are also common puzzles in the Escape Game genre, and were popularized by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 mystery story The Gold Bug.
Examples:
3. Paranormal Investigation Games
The paranormal, supernatural, and occult have always been closely associated with detective fiction. Like its real-life counterpart, the primary objective in these games is to investigate a location containing paranormal activity.
However, it is not just mindless adventuring; logical deduction is involved with figuring out what kind of entity is haunting the location and/or piecing together the events that led up to the haunting. The player will need to use various devices and investigative techniques to reach the truth.
Examples:
4. Realistic Simulation Games
This kind of game hones in on one specific aspect of the mystery-solving process and creates a realistic simulation. These games create an immersive 3D environment, allowing the player to feel like they are actually performing the job or task that a real person involved in such a situation would be performing.
However, because of this subgenre's narrow focus, some games in this genre might be more related to the "crime" than "mystery", but nonetheless still of interest to anyone who enjoys playing mystery games.
Examples:
5. Artificial Interrogation Games
While generative AI may be seen as controversial to some, it can't be overlooked that a new genre of mystery games has emerged because of it.
This genre allows the player to freely communicate with a Large Language Model AI that responds back to the player in real-time, allowing for a truly dynamic investigation. You must carefully converse by typing (or even speaking) in order to extract the truth from AI-powered suspects and witnesses. All dialogue is generated during the game itself, which makes each playthrough (and potentially each mystery) truly unique.
As the technology continues to improve, AI could become a powerful tool for game developers — but especially developers making mystery games.
Examples:
Possibly more…?
For the sake of this article staying somewhat short, there are also more genres that I think could see a lot of growth in the coming future. For that, you will need to wait until my mystery game design book is published, where I will go into more detail.
If you are signed up to this newsletter, then you will be the first to know when it’s ready.
And one final note: it is actually pretty difficult to discover these games in the first place, because there are not really any tags to describe them (at least, on traditional stores — all the more reason for our own mystery game database).
So if you know of more examples, please let everyone know in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
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