The Mermaid Mask

Introduction

The Mermaid Mask opens with a body: Captain Magnus Mortuga, found dead beside an ancient cauldron aboard the strangest submarine anyone in its abandoned fishing town has ever seen. Detective Grimoire and his partner Sally arrive to work the case, questioning a submarine's worth of sketchy suspects to figure out who did it and why. Developed and published by SFB Games as the third entry in the Detective Grimoire series, following the original Detective Grimoire and the beloved Tangle Tower, it released 16 July 2026 to an "Overwhelmingly Positive" reception: 99.5% across 1,978 reviews, on a 100-review English sample this review reads in full. That's an exceptional score even by this library's standards, and reading the sample shows a rare thing: a review corpus that agrees, almost without exception, on exactly why.

A mystery told through outstanding craft

Nearly every review in the sample, positive or negative, singles out the same qualities. "Endlessly charming, stylistic and incredible art, impeccable voice acting and a great point-and-click detective game," reads one, and another compares individual lines of dialogue to fine writing more broadly: "they can read me milk bottle plaquette and I would be impressed." Fans of the studio's earlier games specifically call this entry a step up — "the sequel does not shy away from being absolutely gorgeous, being funny with its duo of detectives, being emotionally gripping with its suspects," reads a review from a returning player, and another calls the story "meatier" than Tangle Tower with "a number of surprising turns." One especially detailed review flags a small animation touch as evidence of the game's overall craft: a character's pipe visibly changes their mouth animation, and the voice line itself sounds subtly muffled to match, prompting the reviewer to call it "madness" that a detail that small got that much attention.

Two returning detectives, a beloved cast

The emotional core reviewers return to again and again is the cast itself. Grimoire and Sally return alongside a new set of submarine-bound suspects, and multiple reviewers describe genuinely not wanting the story to end — "I'll miss Sally and Grimoire," reads one, and several others explicitly ask for a fourth game, referencing an in-game joke about whether one might exist. That attachment isn't incidental to the review sample's score: for a story-and-dialogue-first game like this one, a cast reviewers are sad to leave behind is close to the entire pitch, and the sample suggests SFB Games has nailed it for a third time running.

Where the small negative sample lands

With only ten negative reviews out of 1,978, the critical voices in the sample are a minority by any measure, but the two specific complaints they raise are concrete and worth taking at face value rather than dismissing. One reviewer reports a genuine technical problem: the game's autosave gave an on-screen assurance that progress had been saved, but on relaunch, none of several hours of a second session had actually persisted, and there is no manual save or load option to fall back on when that happens. A second reviewer's complaint is about pacing and design rather than a bug: they found the investigation loop — asking many characters about many objects, one at a time, until something new surfaces — genuinely tedious across a full playthrough, even while praising the game's characters, setting, and dialogue as "all great." A handful of otherwise glowing reviews echo a softer version of that same note, wishing the puzzles themselves carried more mechanical challenge rather than functioning mostly as a structure for delivering dialogue.

What the achievement data shows

Across 21 tracked achievements, the completion curve is unusually healthy for the genre. The first chapter milestone sits at 94.3%, and several mid-game story and collection achievements cluster in the high 70s to low 80s, evidence of a game that holds the overwhelming majority of its audience deep into its runtime. Completing the entire game sits at 66.2% — a strong number for any narrative adventure — while the rarest achievements, tied to optional side content like a hidden hexapus creature and a silver snake collectible, sit in the high 20s to high 30s, consistent with a small but genuine population of completionists hunting down every optional detail rather than a broad population bouncing off partway through.

Value

At NZ$30.99 with no DLC or in-app purchases found at review time, The Mermaid Mask sits at the higher end for a narrative point-and-click adventure, and value here depends almost entirely on how much a given player weighs fully voiced, richly animated storytelling against total playtime, which reviewers report in the 8-to-12-hour range for a single, thorough playthrough. For the audience this game is built for — fans of story-rich mystery adventures who want the genre's presentation values pushed as far as they'll go — the near-unanimous sample suggests that trade lands well; for anyone expecting deep mechanical puzzles or high replayability, it's a weaker value case.

Final Verdict

The Mermaid Mask earns its "Overwhelmingly Positive" reception on the strength of exactly what SFB Games has built its reputation on: gorgeous animation, exceptional voice acting, and a mystery plot with a genuinely beloved cast at its centre. Its real weaknesses are narrow and specific rather than pervasive — a save-reliability bug serious enough to cost at least one player hours of progress, and an investigation loop that a small but vocal slice of the sample finds repetitive rather than absorbing. For point-and-click mystery fans, this is close to a genre highlight; for anyone who came for mechanically deep puzzles, that was never really the pitch.