The Winners of Mystery Game Jam 2025
Future events and next steps for winners and other participants
Finally, after 3 weeks of playing and voting on over 50 mystery games, the results of the 2025 Mystery Game Jam are in!
About the Ratings Process
During the past few weeks there was some discussion about the ratings process, so let me take a minute to explain how it works.
Itch advises against allowing full public voting due to potential for cheating, and I was not able to bring together a panel of judges for this year’s event due to time constraints, so I believed this was the best method for now.
Games that receive many more ratings are assumed to be higher quality, since they attracted a larger number of people into playing them. But this assumption can also be unfairly manipulated by bad actors.
So instead, Itch recommends limiting the votes so that only other participants who submitted entries can rate the games.
(Just like in a courtroom, you are being judged by a jury of your peers!)
By doing so, it accomplishes the following goals:
Prevents creators with large followings automatically winning
Prevents bot farms from rigging the votes
Encourages creators to network with each other
That last part is in my opinion the most important, as we are trying to host a friendly competition where what matters most is not necessarily any prizes won, but the friends, connections, and memories we make along the way.
Still, this is not a perfect system.
With votes limited to a small group of people, it also means that a small group of people have say over who wins — one vote could change everything.
Also, there was not much of an incentive for the participants to cast votes, which resulted in a surprisingly low voter turnout.
So, we will look into alternatives or improvements for next year.
The Winners
Now with all that said, I did actually end up playing and voting on every single game that was submitted to the game jam. If I haven’t left a comment on yours yet, I will be doing so over the next few days.
My playthroughs were also recorded, but have not been uploaded anywhere as of yet. I had a lot of fun, and I know creators enjoy watching people play their games, so maybe I should post them on our Mystery Gamedev channel!
Anyway, all of this is to say that I was truly blown away at the overall quality and creativity across every single entry.
Looking at the results right now, and based on what I played (and without getting into my own personal preferences), I think the results are, overall, reasonably fair.
If you ended up low in the rankings, don’t feel too bad about it — it was usually due to one of the following issues:
Unplayable due to heavy lag or poor optimization
No clear way to proceed or finish the game
Incomplete game or unsolved mystery
Some small changes to your game can easily fix those problems!
More importantly, there were genuinely so many high quality games! With just a bit more time to polish or expand them, I could easily see a large percentage of these games having highly successful post-jam releases.
If the decision had been left up solely to me, I would have struggled to only pick three games, maybe even five.
So do not feel bad about wherever you placed!
Instead — and I sincerely mean this — you should feel proud of having created a mystery game within 30 days, and I hope you genuinely had fun and learned many lessons along the way, because that is what really counts!
Okay, now with that out of the way… Let’s begin!
Honorable Mention — Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
One message from a missing journalist draws you into a detective mystery full of clues, puzzles, and secrets.
Ranked 4th place overall, this game was featured by Itch and gathered a very large number of positive comments and reviews from players as a result.
Although we won’t be awarding anything to games ranked below 3rd place, I still felt compelled to mention this game. It’s an excellent example of how taking the time to make a short demo for a game jam can lead to huge exposure for your studio and your future games — regardless of your ranking in the competition.
3rd Place — 18 Days of Silence
The crew is dead. The computer has been wiped. The mission has failed. Can you solve this sci-fi mystery?
A last message sent from a dead crew in outer space was a very commonly used concept across all the entries, but this game was a clear winner among them.
It presents itself with Golden Idol mechanics: you are given a number of cameras that peer into the spaceship and must deduce how each crew member was killed, who killed them, and why these mysterious events happened in the first place.
The atmosphere feels alive (no pun intended), with clean pixel art and a space-appropriate soundtrack. The game presents all of its information upfront so you can dive right into the deductions with quick pacing.
As you will see in the comments, there is one especially tricky puzzle involving a combination code. When I played the game, no matter how hard I tried, I unfortunately just couldn’t figure it out. The good news is that others did solve it eventually, so I hope to come back to it soon and uncover the final piece of the puzzle myself!
2nd Place — Project Lighthouse
A minimal experience about aligning broken visual structures and uncovering the mystery of a lighthouse.
There were many entries in the computer-sim genre, and this game frames itself as an abstract computer simulation where you are tasked with aligning visual structures.
Specifically, you must rotate a 3D cube that contains a 3D shape inside of it, such that when you look at the shape, it forms a specific 2D image — like a lighthouse.
But when you rotate that same 3D shape and look at it from different angles, it forms completely different 2D images!
I was blown away by this from a technical perspective, and I am still left wondering how it was done. Also, if you are not very good at these kinds of puzzles, the game allows you to skip to the next one without punishment.
Each visual structure depicts a hint at the overarching story, culminating in a literal last message that explains the mystery of a lighthouse with an emotional twist.
1st Place — Curse of Shunned Wolf
Use a magical gramophone to investigate an inexplicable dust storm
Curse of Shunned Wolf has you investigating a ghost town with a unique twist.
Not only is there a definitive last message that acts an important plot point and clue relevant to the mystery, but the core gameplay mechanic is using a magical gramophone to uncover many last messages all throughout the town — and then using words from those messages to uncover even more.
The closest game I can compare this to is Her Story, in which you use keywords to search for story fragments that uncover more keywords, and so on. This game takes a similar approach, but instead you move to a physical location in the town and enter a keyword to view scenes in which that keyword was spoken in that location.
Through these scenes, you slowly piece together the mystery of the dust storm and what happened to cause the deaths of all but one survivor in the town. That survivor has asked you to prove their innocence and reveal the truth of what happened.
Each location lets you know when there are more scenes left to uncover, and there are many different ways to experience the same story. Digging deep through the history of the town reveals a complex, non-linear narrative with characters hiding many secrets from each other.
For art and sound, the game has an appropriate old-timey Wild West aesthetic, accompanied only by the chilling ambient sounds of wind — a constant reminder of the dust storm that brought the town to ruin.
Interestingly, the game presents an option to leave the town immediately without even uncovering anything. So just like a real ghost town, you might accidentally miss all of the history and secrets that it has to offer. The true ending is yours to discover.
Next Steps for Winners & Participants
If you are part of the teams who had entries listed in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place, please be sure to join our Discord server to receive your exclusive “Mystery Game Jam Winner” Discord Role. Feel free to ping me in the Mystery Game Jam channel if you don’t yet have the role, and we’ll make sure you get your prize!
Also, I will be updating the Mystery Gamedev Website this week to prominently display all three winning games on the front page.
For all other participants, also be sure to join our Discord server anyway for other roles. If this is the first time you’ve released a game or even just a demo, you’ll get a Developer role that will allow access to the Developer channels, where we offer ongoing support for each other as we create many new mystery games.
Again, if you qualify for a Developer role but somehow I missed you, just ping me in the Mystery Game Jam channel and we’ll get it sorted out!
Future Events
I’ve learned a lot from hosting our first ranked game jam, and I will carry these lessons forward into next year’s event.
I will be sending out a survey for our participants via e-mail by the end of the week, where you can submit more detailed and anonymous feedback to help make next year’s event even better.
Also, I will be writing another newsletter article sometime in June that goes into some interesting statistics about this year’s jam. Maybe I can include some stats from the survey there as well.
We have plans to do another Mystery Game Jam next year, and toward the end of the year we’ll have a new jam aimed at helping you revisit and finish scrapped projects and incomplete demos — so stay tuned!
Thank you all for participating and playing so many games! And remember, even though the event is over, you can still play and comment on all the entries! I’m sure the developers would love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading!
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