Mystery Tropes: The Start of a Game Idea

Learn the importance of tropes in mystery game design

If you’ve ever wondered where a mystery game idea comes from, the answer is going to start with mystery tropes.

What Are Mystery Tropes?

In general, a trope is a narrative device that instantly provides familiarity across stories. Any story element can be a trope, including:

• a character, like an eccentric detective or femme fatale

• a setting, like a private island or countryside manor

• a plot device, like an impossible crime or mysterious time loop

Tropes are patterns that have been used many times — across many different stories — that players instantly recognize them.

As a result, tropes help define your game’s genre, and they set expectations for what kind of story the player is about to experience.

Players see mystery tropes before they see anything else — even before the start of the game. Tropes are plastered all over store pages and promotional materials.

That way, any game’s potential audience knows what kind of story that they’re going to experience before buying it.

Players need the ability to choose between, for example, playing a cozy mystery game versus a noir mystery game. They have very different feels — different moods, atmospheres, and are designed for very different audiences.

A kid-friendly mystery is going to present itself very differently from a gritty, mature mystery story where there’s murder involved, right?

So a good mystery game will use consistent tropes that reflect its intended audience.

And sometimes, if you mix tropes that normally don’t go together, that might be an interesting creative decision.

But you want to carefully use your tropes in a way to target the right people so that they know what they’re getting into and that you deliver something that they actually want to experience.

Mixing and matching tropes

So one of the easiest ways to brainstorm ideas for a mystery is to just combine these tropes in different ways.

It gives you a premise for a story.

So, for example, we can take a retired police officer, stick him in a haunted castle, and he experiences a mysterious time loop.

Or maybe we can have a nosy neighbor go into a country manor and find a last message.

The idea is that the more mysteries that you read or watch or experience, you will come across more and more of these tropes because they’re the same recurring ideas across multiple stories.

And that’s why it’s important to not just create mysteries, but also consume them to a certain extent, right?

You don’t want to consume too much, but you have to consume enough to know what is currently out there, as well as what’s been done before.

The point isn’t to copy, but to have a starting point from which to expand from.

Consume the classics. They’re classics for a reason — they stand the test of time.

If you look at the earliest detective stories — written in the 19th century — they used tropes that are still often employed today:

• Eccentric detective

• Narrator as sidekick

• Locked room mystery

• Incompetent police

• Countryside robbery

And many more.

Then, in the early 20th century, the authors of the Golden Age mystery novels were successful because they had decades of tropes to work with.

They formalized those tropes into sets of rules, while simultaneously breaking those rules by subverting each trope and defying audience expectations.

And so the key to an interesting mystery is not to invent new tropes, but to reuse old tropes in new but interesting ways.

If your story doesn’t adhere to tropes at all, it just ends up being confusing.

But if it relies too much on tropes, then it’s just boring.

So success is when you strike exactly the right balance.

The creators of the most popular mysteries clearly knew this, and deliberately used tropes to their advantage.

And anyone creating a mystery video game has to do the same.

You have to remember that you’re not designing your game in a vacuum.

Your players bring decades of pop culture experience into your game.

They’ve read mystery novels, they’ve watched crime dramas, and they’ve played other popular mystery games.

They already carry dozens of tropes in their heads, and you can’t stop them from thinking about them.

But what you can do, and should do, is use that information to your advantage.

If the player has seen a mystery story with your tropes in it before, then you’ve instantly communicated information to them in a very efficient way.

What makes a mystery idea interesting is not the tropes that it uses specifically, but how it uses those tropes and how it creatively builds upon them.

Making good use of mystery tropes

There are 3 ways to effectively utilize mystery tropes when creating a mystery game.