Best Crime Solving Games, Ranked

Mystery stories have existed forever, and have changed to fit countless mediums. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, crime-solving detective TV shows, and suspense movies that task ordinary people with impossible puzzles are all an extension of the mystery tale. Some games stand out as exceptional examples of mysteries that players can solve as they play, stories that unfold ahead of them to allow fans to use their deductive reasoning and logic to uncover the narrative.

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Here are the best crime-solving games for players to get their teeth sunk into. The case is afoot!

9 Deadly Premonition

Metascore - 70

A surreal and supernatural adventure that walks the line between gritty detective drama and tense survival horror, Deadly Premonition starts with a murder case. Fans will become York, an FBI investigator looking into a series of murders, the latest of which took place in a remote American town. The killer, who comes to be known as 'the Raincoat Killer' will ambush York across the map but the pace of the investigation is left up to the player. Fans are let loose in the town where they can walk or drive to get to different interactions with NPCs to interview. Shaving and cleaning their suit means they look more presentable and may get a bonus: they can spend their money on more fuel for the car or on cigarettes to wait for a few hours.

The realism in this simulation makes the visions of demons and paranormal worlds incredibly effective, and York will have to battle his way through constant opposition to reach the shocking ending. This paired with a lovable cast and the peculiar survival aspects make this perfect for stepping into a crime-solver's shoes and feeling like players are part of the world.

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8 Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments

Metascore - 73

• Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
• Release Date: 30 September 2014
• Developer: Frogwares

Putting players in the eccentric mind of one of the most famous names in detective story history is a daunting challenge, but Frogwares' valiant attempt with Crimes & Punishments is as close as any game has come. All of the expected abilities that Sherlock demonstrates in his stories are here, with a scanning function to identify intricate details about the characters he interacts with and his uncanny ability to reconstruct a crime scene or develop a hypothesis based on only the autopsy. Players will be presented with all of the information that Sherlock gathers, and will then be able to link these pieces of the puzzle together on the 'deduction board'.

Players can actually manage to connect the dots the wrong way, coming to the wrong conclusion and getting a darker ending to the case. Being a detective is hard, forcing players to make difficult decisions and the crimes are often messy and ambiguous.

7 Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Metascore - 80

When an evil mechanical bear appears in a private school and tasks the students with killing each other but getting away with it, the stakes are instantly pretty high. Despite the larger-than-life premise, the game becomes a crazy tale of intrigue with a real focus on dismantling the excuses and arguments of the protagonist's classmates. Play is split into three segments: daily life, where players can speak to other students to gain information and get closer to them, free time, where players can gift their favorite characters presents to get more clues to use in the trial and finally deadly life, during which the class hold a trial to decide who the killer is.

Players will need to utilize all of the information they have uncovered to make the correct logical leaps and shoot through the classmates' arguments with bullets of truth. While it is wacky, any crime-solving gamer will love sinking their teeth into the complex cases in Danganronpa.

6 Hypnospace Outlaw

Metascore - 83

A blast from the past, Hypnospace Outlaw makes players into keyboard cowboys who have to use the retro interfaces of the 90's era internet to track down cyberbullies, copyright infringement, and other strange criminals that lurk in the corners of the early web. With a whole host of nostalgic additions, like screensavers and goofy mouse pointers, players can take a trip down memory lane while investigating disturbing content, strange conspiracies, or just loopy lunatics. For players who remember MySpace and who want a backlog of cases to solve that range from hackers to cult webpages, this is the game for you. A modern mystery for fans of the techy side of crime.

5 The Case Of The Golden Idol

Metascore - 84

A modern title that borrows the best from the genre to combine into an amazing deduction game, The Case Of The Golden Idol follows the valuable relic that seems to hold some kind of ancient powers. Across fifty years, the player will have to explore locations to collect any clues and information that they can to then piece together to solve a series of murders. All while the crime scenes replay over and over, letting players search the character's pockets, see what they have said in the prior moments, and see events unfolding precisely as they did.

As players place the clues they have collected into a statement that sums up the suspicious happenings, fans will follow the Golden Idol across time and see all of the corruption and killing surrounding the piece.

4 Nancy Drew Series

Metascore - 85

A series of PC games that are all solid, with a few amazing standouts, the Nancy Drew series is a staple in the crime-solving genre. Players step into the petite shoes of the titular teen and will journey around maps, make allies, interview witnesses and suspects, and complete fiendishly difficult puzzles to finally arrive at the conclusion of the stories. Nancy Drew's quirky sense of humor carries the games to silly heights, and the puzzles are genuinely quite difficult and can make for thoughtful experimental gameplay.

The point-and-click gameplay allows players to wander the world that Nancy finds herself in at their own pace, making for a captivating and charming experience.

3 Immortality

Metascore - 87

Created by visionary developers at Sam Barlow, Immortality puts players straight into the place of a sleuth who is searching through old movie footage. Three films starring a young up-and-coming actress, over a few years, were never released and now the actress has gone missing. Players have to trawl through old film reels, uncovering more footage as they go, to piece together the story. What appears at first to be a story of torrid affairs and awful accidents quickly becomes a supernatural tale of murder and possession.

Players scrolling through footage can really insert themselves into the narrative as a detective trawling old tapes to find the next clue, and the ending makes the mystery truly jump off the screen.

2 Return Of The Obra Dinn

Metascore - 89

After not being seen for five years, the missing ship 'Obra Dinn' drifts into port in 1807. An insurance investigator is dispatched to find out what happened to the crew and what went wrong. That's where players come in, aboard an empty ship and using their deductive reasoning to uncover the answers. The art style, a monochromatic and pixelated blur that is beautifully captured, presents the whole case in a perfect package. Players start with a logbook with the names of the sailors aboard and the ship's planned course, which is filled out slowly as more details are gathered.

The player can also use a pocketwatch to rewind and see the final moments of any corpses that are found on the ship, which can enable more detailed discoveries and for the events that conspired against the crew to be more and more fleshed out. The game has been praised widely as one of the best mystery games of all time, and fans will see why when they start to deduce how the killings and corruption took place.

1 Disco Elysium

Metascore - 91

Waking up with a killer hangover, players of Disco Elysium will quickly realize that their washed-up detective has no idea who he is, where he is, or what he is supposed to be doing. He has drunk so much that he has given himself amnesia, but after he heads downstairs and meets his new partner, he is plunged into a tense world of clashing ideologies, corruption, and poverty. And a man is dead.

Fans of the game praise Disco Elysium for the systems that see the protagonist talking to every character on the map and going up against skill tests to determine if he will manipulate, lie, or feign ignorance towards them to inform how much he can get out of every possible witness. With incredible writing and a tendency to dwell on the detective's inner turmoil, Disco Elysium is a quality mystery story that players will love to uncover.

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