It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
Sometimes, on my better days, I think I know the answer to what keeps me up at night. Or that I have it in me to figure it out. I like those days because even though they start with a problem, I know where to go, what to do, or who to ask to solve it. That's a pretty good day. Not too many of those lately.
Perhaps this is why, when considering the year that was, mysteries – particularly video game mysteries – come to mind. Of all the entertainment released in 2025, I was drawn to these the most: I know the dirty secret of the Roottree family. I know why Evelyn Deane disappeared from Blake Manor. I know the truth about Mt. Holly Estate. Some questions wormed into my head, and I answered them. I had problems, and I solved them.
When executed well, sleuthing suits video games even more naturally than violence, a contest between the programming logic of video games and the human ability to think laterally. One of the first things you learn about coding is that computers are literal to a degree that is, frankly, madness-inducing. The genius of any particular application, including video games, lies in how elegantly it hides the fact that it is reducing your every input into a cascade of simple binary decisions. However, even with a program designed to do all of the heavy lifting for you, even with all the cumulative experience of the internet at your disposal, sometimes the thing that lies between you and your goal is the wildly frustrating task of figuring out how to ask the right question.
This also happens to be the engine that drives a good mystery.
On a basic level, a video game mystery narrativizes one of the most fundamental computational functions: Querying a database. (The narrative designer Bruno Dias has called games expressly built around that function "database thrillers" for this reason, going so far as to jam out his own – quite good! – text parser version of one, Kinophobia.) Defining the right parameters that will separate the endless sea of useless data from the precious and narrow set of information you can actually use, perhaps to form another query in turn, rendering previously useless data into something vital. Once again: Asking the right questions.
The Roottrees Are Dead, Jeremy Johnston and Robin Ward's 2025 remake of Johnston's browser game of the same name, operates on this fundamental level. It casts the player as an amateur genealogist, asked by a mysterious client to trace the family tree of the Roottree sisters. Recently deceased in a private plane crash just before the start of the game, the sisters are heirs to a massive family fortune, and their untimely demise means a significant windfall for the extended family.
The pleasures of The Roottrees Are Dead lie in doing the task it sets out for you in its simulated tactility. The game is set in 1998, and in researching the Roottree family, the player bounces between a table with relevant documents and photographs to examine, a corkboard where they lay out the family tree, and a desktop computer with a blistering 56k modem for surfing the information superhighway. A notebook, available at the push of a button, allows you to type notes or collect highlighted passages from your research materials. Using all these tools, a family's history becomes a giant jigsaw puzzle, a deductive riddle that feels impossible until you just buckle down and do the work. One good lead yields another, and then another, and finally you have names and faces and the puzzle begins to take shape.
But these aren't just puzzle pieces: They're people. The connections and if/then questions that determine where they fit in the Roottree pedigree are just part of the story. What makes The Roottrees Are Dead such an exceptional game is in the way it tells you from the start that one branch of the family tree is off-limits until the end, an optional question where the answer isn't so much there to be found as it is inferred. In laying out the endgame this way, Johnston and Ward provoke the player: Were you merely solving the puzzle? Or were you paying attention to the story it told? You know the what – how about why? Can you see the people hidden between the data points?
In the twilight of the 19th century, the massive disruption of the industrial revolution left European high society in a state of unease, as the edges of a carefully-constructed social order began to crumble. Literacy spread among the middle class, the world shrank as steamships sent people all over the globe, new customs and experiences shook the once–strong foundations of Christian institutions. For many people of means and those who aspired to such status, the church was insufficient at addressing their moment of malcontent. The occult took root.
Set in the final three days of October 1897, The Seance of Blake Manor follows Declan Ward, a detective from Dublin, after he receives a mysterious commission to investigate the disappearance of Evelyn Deane. Deane was one of a number of mystics and magic-curious from all over the world invited to Blake Manor, a hotel in Western Ireland, for a Grand Seance to take place on Samhain, the day when the veil between the mortal world and the spirit realm is thinnest. Assuming the role of Ward, the player wanders the eponymous manor, snooping through rooms and asking guests questions, each exchange or observation deepening the mystery of Ms. Deane's disappearance.
The Seance of Blake Manor is a work of folk horror, which means that history has something to say here, whether the story's characters are able to hear it or not. (They will pay if they don't.) While a far more traditional narrative than The Roottrees Are Dead, Blake Manor is similarly powerful in its subtext. Every character is haunted by some private thing that has brought them to the seance; each is fleeing something or in denial or mourning or desperation. It causes them to be cruel, selfish, reckless. You can piece these backstories together for as many characters as you wish – the game encourages you to solve them all – but what lingers for me is the weight of all that history.
In the search for Evelyn Deane, Declan Ward must repeatedly contend with the beliefs of others. He learns much about Irish folklore, of the fae and the Other World and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pagan deities worshipped in Gaelic Ireland before Christianity arrived in the country. He sees evidence of the ways both Catholics and Protestants have incorporated those pagan traditions, turning them into saints or holy days. He meets people from around the world who have their own version of those same saints and gods.
Blake Manor requires you to note all this, and think about it some. Learning the faith of each character you meet is integral to solving its mystery. But in this story, Christ and Allah are both just characters in books. The pagan deities, however, are very much real.
I don't believe this is the game choosing a side, asserting that the pagans had it right and everything else is just a fairytale. Rather, I think The Seance of Blake Manor's choice to slowly, deliberately communicate that, in its fiction, the folkloric deities are real is meant to underline the ways in which the indigenous beliefs and cultures of a place are never really gone, even after waves of colonization, industry, and plunder. The spirits are real in Blake Manor because we have fooled ourselves into thinking that wealthy men who build monuments to their fortunes and family name are the only ones who get to write their stories upon the land, forgetting that the land might have stories of its own. Will you seek them out, even if you don't have to? Will you carry that history within you, and keep it alive just a little while longer?
Like many others this year, I have lost countless nights in search of the secret 46th room in the Mt. Holly Estate, and for the bewildering number of mysteries Room 46 is but a mere prelude to. I have many of the answers I set out to find, but I still have further questions beyond them. I also know that the point here may very well be learning to quit.
It's remarkable that Tonda Ros' Blue Prince is structured as a roguelike, a genre defined by its endlessness and infinite possibility. This brings the game in conflict with its narrative setup, which casts the player as Simon P. Jones, a young boy who has learned his wealthy uncle has willed his entire estate to him – provided he can find the hidden 46th room in the logic-defying 45-room mansion that changes its layout every day. Such an explicit goal implies an ending, and upon achieving it, credits do roll. But as anyone who has played Blue Prince knows, that ending is merely an ending. It is also not a solution. Simon's strange quest, the magical nature of the house – which, after enough excursions, is clearly diegetic and not just an allowance for gameplay – are the first of many whys that are left unsaid by that initial ending.
Thus the real mystery of Blue Prince begins, but what that mystery is largely depends on the player. What about this house and the family who built it did you notice, or care about? What in its many possible configurations, its hidden foundations, its many scrawled notes that double back and recontextualize previous findings, bedevils you? Is the game truly endless, like its genre structure implies? Can you be at peace with that? Or do you refuse to accept it?
Consider again how well-suited games are for mystery, how they can present players with impossible enigmas but also guide and nudge them towards asking the right questions. Games can assure players that the world is knowable. We talk about power fantasies, and perhaps this is the most seductive one, even more so than those that give us guns or impossible abilities or great destinies. The fantasy of a world that fits together.
I find that fantasy alluring. Justice has been lacking in my lifetime, and it may not be my lot to see it win the day. I like the idea that asking the right question is the first step to making sense of the world. And if I ask the right question and then answer it skillfully, I can find some kind of peace. Or at least, know what it is that will give me a direction to walk until I find it.
This is a delusion, but a useful one. Answers aren't what make questions worth asking, but go long enough without finding your way to one and, well. That's a lot of sleepless nights. Sometimes you need a ballast.
If there is a reason these games are the mysteries that have resonated with me most strongly this year, this is why: because while they provide all the pleasures of a solvable problem, of crimes answered for, they also present me with so much I cannot know. Of how much escapes the record of material evidence in the gaps of a family tree or a nigh-forgotten folkloric tradition or the inscrutable patterns of an ever-shifting mansion. There is tragedy in this, but also grace, and humility. In grappling with them, solving a mystery takes on another, more durable purpose: making peace with what I don't know, so I can be brave with what I do know. Every day I'm able to do that would make for a good day. Every year I strive for that goal would be a good year.
Everybody loved Blue Prince, and at this point it feels like everybody has finished (or, “finished”) Blue Prince, but I’m still here thinking “boy, I really should get back to Blue Prince” while knowing there’s a good chance I won’t. As much as I liked what I played, it just didn’t get its hooks in my brain the way it did with others, and it’s the kind of game that needs passion to see it through. But I have finally found my sicko mode, “can’t stop thinking about it and need to talk to everyone about it” puzzle game: The Seance of Blake Manor.
The Seance of Blake Manor casts you as Declan Ward, a detective in 1890s Ireland who’s been called to a mysterious manor hotel to investigate the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Deane. A diverse crew of guests has gathered at the manor to attend a seance, and it quickly becomes clear that they all have their reasons to wish Deane harm. You have the weekend to figure out what happened to Deane and who’s responsible before the seance occurs on Sunday night.
The time limit can feel pressuring, but time only passes when you undertake certain clearly-marked actions, such as examining objects, questioning guests, and attending events like meals and lectures. An important first step in solving the mystery is filling your timetable with the weekend’s activities and guests’ schedules, so you’ll know who will or won’t be where every hour. The latter is particularly helpful; one fruitful avenue of investigation is to break into everyone’s rooms and go through their stuff, and you definitely don’t want to get caught. Ask me how I know.
Every guest and staff of the hotel has a backstory, motive, and relationships with other characters. And they’re not just cursory stuff for atmosphere; I almost immediately forgot about the game’s central mystery as I dug into secret love affairs, thwarted career ambitions, cryptic plots, mystical societies, class and race tensions, failed romances, and people struggling to square their faiths with a changing Ireland and with the popularity of Spiritualism, a 19th and early 20th century movement to communicate with the dead that threatened much of society’s status quo. (Spiritualism is one of my top niche interests, and I’m also currently learning the Irish language; the fact that there’s a game about both is very exciting for me specifically.) To add to the plot stuff, the game is also full of things to learn about the history of the manor, Chrisitian gnosticism, and Irish folklore, politics, and history–a lot of this information is kept in the manor’s library, where you can research plot-essential stuff, but also browse the shelves for more detail on a topic. I’ve spent way more time doing this than I have actually trying to figure out what happened to Deane; I’m currently just before Saturday dinner and feel like I have no hope of solving her mystery and preventing whatever horrors it’s hinted will happen at Sunday night’s seance. With over 20 characters to learn about and whose problems to solve, I’m constantly panicking about the time limit, though players who’ve beaten the game tell me not to worry and that they ended things with time to spare.
The game has a robust set of menus to help you keep track of all this and figure out what to do next. When you talk to characters, available topics are represented by icons to choose from, and while characters will only talk about certain topics so you don’t fritter away your time too badly, not all of them are essential for your investigations. Discovering more about the topics that are important places those topics on a mind map/ conspiracy board that shows how they’re connected and paints an overall picture of a character and their story. (I’d show you images, but they would be full of spoilers; you can see a glimpse of this in the trailer above.) When you’ve connected enough bits of information, you’re given a Mad Libs-style screen in which to create a hypothesis by filling in words from your conspiracy board, and then you can confront that particular character about it. I found these Mad Libs a little fiddly on occasion to express my hypothesis exactly how the game wanted me to, but it’s a fun mechanic with a lot of guardrails to make sure you know what’s going on. So far, some of my confrontations have wrapped up a character’s story, while others have introduced actions I need to take to fully resolve things, which means more investigating.
The game menus do their best to keep everything organized for you and to nudge you about where to go next, but I haven’t always found it to be quite enough, so I also keep a notebook beside me while I play. Occasionally I’ve been frustrated when I feel like I know enough to confront a character but haven’t discovered all the things to let the game know I know them, but those instances have been pretty rare. My main problem is that everything is so interesting that I’m constantly getting off track, suddenly remembering that time is ticking down and I’m no closer to putting my top priorities to bed.
For me, The Seance of Blake Manor echoes Blue Prince’s interlocking mysteries and sense of place without having to contend with its life-eating RNG and open-endedness (I’ve also seen some players compare the two game’s art styles.). There’s some Lorelei and the Laser Eyes vibes too (a game I actually did finish!), and I’ve wrestled with wanting to start again to introduce the game to the friend I played Lorelei with, and not wanting anything to come between me and seeing its end. But at the same time, I’m tempted to start again just so there’ll be more game to play, even though I have a full in-game day and evening left; like a good book, I both want to know what happens in the end and to never be done with it.
It sucks to be writing about Blake Manor on a Monday morning because now I want to be playing it but a whole work day stands in the way. There is just so much in this game, all of it given so much detail and attention that I’m thoroughly lost in it, while still providing enough guidance to keep me from getting totally washed away. It’s captured the obsession and passion of all those puzzle games I couldn’t get into this year, while still being a constrained experience I can actually tackle, with that time limit bringing a tension that feels essential to the game’s story and atmosphere. There’s a free demo on Steam if you want to get a feel for it first; you should do this not just because the game is good, but because then I’ll have more people playing alongside me to talk about it with.
Turnips! Everywhere! As far as the eye can see! Well, not quite, but The Séance of Blake Manor certainly has a lot of them. This might seem like a strange place to start when talking about developer Spooky Doorway's brilliant new supernatural detective mystery, but it actually says quite a lot about what makes it so good. Here, a fun historical footnote - that jack-o'-lanterns were originally carved from turnips - is turned into a feature, as glowering turnip faces leer from shadowy corners and sit in ghoulish formation along the sweep of an imposing staircase. In the grand scheme of things, a minor detail - but it's also one that lends this spooky deductive yarn an air of historical authenticity that sells its supernatural premise so much harder.