Why Horror Makes For Great Mysteries

How Mystery Gamedevs can (and should) use horror to their advantage

A few quick announcements before we get into today’s main topic:

1. Cold Case Jam starts November 1st! You’ll have two months to finish an existing mystery game. Read the rules and register here.

2. The Mystery Game Masterclass signups are temporarily offline while we resolve a technical issue. We’ll send an email as soon as it becomes available again!

3. Steam Scream Fest sale goes from today until next Monday. Good discounts on mystery-horror titles if you’re looking for something spooky!

With Halloween being just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about the overlap between mystery and horror.

The mystery genre has always been deeply connected to the horror genre in some way.

The first modern detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was written in 1841 by the famous horror author Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s mystery certainly has a tinge of horror to it as well: the bodies of the murder victims are horrifically mutilated, ghosts and the supernatural become suspects, and the perpetrator turns out to be an actual monster.

Perhaps we could even trace the origins of horror and mystery to the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, circa 429 BC, in which the main character investigates a murder only to realize that he was the killer all along.

But the link between horror and mystery becomes even more clear when we look at the origins of mystery video games.

The first mystery video game is appropriately titled Mystery House. Released in 1980, in this game you are trapped in a Victorian mansion with a number of people, one of them the murderer, while each person gets killed off one by one. Your goal is to identify the killer and make an escape.

The developers of Mystery House, Ken and Roberta Williams (founders of Sierra Entertainment), cited Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and the board game Clue as inspirations for the game. Mystery House was not only a pioneer of the mystery game genre, but it was a pioneer of the horror game genre as well.

Many mystery games throughout the 1980s and 1990s were mystery-horror hybrids, and this blend was pivotal in developing the genre, such as in games like Otogirisō (1992) which heavily uses sound to enhance atmosphere, or Silent Hill (1999) which surrounds the player in both literal and metaphorical darkness.

Even my personal favorite mystery game, Umineko no Naku Kori Ni (2007), is filled with as much horror as there is mystery. And incidentally, Mystery Gamedev’s own collaborative project, Reaplaced (2023), ended up being a horror-mystery too.

And generally speaking, according to How to Market a Game, horror games are one of the most popular genres on Steam.

So I think these are all strong reasons why mystery game developers need to learn to use horror to their advantage.

But why are mystery and horror so closely intertwined? And what benefits does horror lend to the mystery genre?

Let’s dig deeper and find out.