The Mermaid Mask Review – We All Live In A Pirate Submarine | GameObserver Recommends

SFB Games, made up of brothers Tom and Adam Vian, began their career as indie developers creating flash games in the 2000s, which includes a Phoenix Wright-inspired detective mystery game, Detective Grimoire. This served more as a proof-of-concept in the long run, and the first official canonical entry in Grimoire’s series came in 2014. The current character designs and overall art style came about in Tangle Tower in 2019 with the increased involvement of artist Catherine Unger. All of the games have had positive reception from players and boast industry awards and nominations from the years of their release. Despite the amount of existing content for the series, you can dive right into The Mermaid Mask without any previous knowledge of Grimoire, Sally, or their adventures. Which is great, because that’s exactly what I did!

We start with Grimoire and Sally in the wee hours of the morning, camped out in the bar of the Stovetop Inn in the small town of Silkwirm-On-Sea. The bar and the other buildings around the town square seem to be abandoned, with boarded up windows and eerily empty streets. Well, it is 4am, so the streets would still be empty even if the town wasn’t abandoned. Though the case file was left in the Inn for them to find, no one has come to meet the detectives or give them more information about the murder they have been summoned to solve.

Once you, the player, have picked up the case file and the novel Sally brought along, Hex of the Helmsman, a mysterious green light shines out in the darkness, leading the pair to the Mortuga Submarine and down into its depths. This is where Captain Magnus Mortuga was murdered. Things still seem deserted, as a note on the locked control room door is the only greeting Sally and Grimoire receive once boarding the submarine. However, after investigating the scene of the crime, more of the ship opens up for exploration, revealing a colorful cast of characters… all with something to hide! The murder isn’t the only mystery there is to be solved, as you discover more about the history of Silkwirm-on-Sea and the people who lived there.

Gameplay is a combination of exploration (clue-finding), puzzle solving (usually to open a safe or secret compartment, revealing a clue), dialogue (interrogating suspects about new clues or other suspects), and finally the Suspicion sequence for each character. This last segment can only be unlocked after you’ve collected all necessary clues for a specific storyline and, usually, presented them to the correct characters to get additional information about them. 

The Suspicion section was actually quite interesting to me, as it varied the type of input it wanted from you. It is slightly reminiscent of a trial segment from a Phoenix Wright game, with multiple-choice dialogue options that are usually followed by choosing an item from your catalogue of clues that backs up your statement. However, there are additional portions where you have to form the conclusions or accusations yourself. You may, for example, have to highlight the specific part of an item, a particular feature or maybe a damaged area, and indicate what that means from a dropdown menu of several choices. Or, given a fill-in-the-blank sentence, drop in the subject and object and then manipulate other dropdown menus to complete the correct statement.

There is no fail state for these sections, which has benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, you don’t have to worry about saving as though you were going into a boss fight, and if you encounter something where the logic doesn’t quite click for you, you can try as many times as you like until you get it, even if you eventually find the solution by brute force. The downside is that there’s less tension in those moments as you can’t even be sent back to start the conversation over.

The puzzles somewhat make up for this by not giving explicit instructions for how they should be solved. They are self-contained, meaning that you don’t have to go looking for a reference or combination somewhere else to be able to solve it. Most of them have some visual indication of what your goal should be, but when clicking the button to “solve” with an unfinished or incorrectly completed puzzle will get a series of hints from Grimoire and Sally discussing how the puzzle should be solved, helping players (me) to realize that certain pieces were actually moveable or giving reminders of limitations (i.e. “the boats can’t be touching each other”.) 

The things that really make this game, and I suspect this series, are the characters and their stories. Despite a rather large cast, with eight suspects and one victim, each of the characters has a kind of arc, whether simply coming to terms with their past, finally discovering a secret, or having a revelation about what they really want in life. Yet The Mermaid Mask has an innate ability to take itself only as seriously as it needs to. We are looking at the murder of a submarine captain, accompanied by a teenage illusionist, a teenage mechanic, a dream doctor, an aeronaut with a crashed balloon, a green woman who claims to be half mermaid, a writer, an actor, and a lady who’s set her tent up in the cargo hold.

It’s a world only tangential to our reality, and there are moments of silliness even in confrontations. I think my favorite thing is when Symmetry Silkmoth, who has been speaking in nigh iambic pentameter for the entire game, gets to the climax of her Suspicion section and has nothing to say but “…dang.” My other favorite bit of dialogue is after they meet Dirk, when Sally asks to keep him and Grimoire responds with “no. You’d forget to feed him.” “You’re right,” Sally sighs, “I would forget to feed him.”

Adam Vian’s script has great moments of banter like this throughout, as flavor when looking around the ship and placed decisively within these longer dialogues. However, the characters all get to experience and demonstrate greater ranges of feeling, both regarding their grief for their friend and for the personal situations that the detectives uncover. This is something of a found family story where a member has been lost, tragically and unexpectedly, and the player is given room to appreciate that aspect in a way that isn’t jarring compared to the lighthearted elements. 

The story itself is paced excellently, I loved the way that some clues were held back for a latter portion of the game using the logic that you can’t take certain actions in front of the suspects, but once they’ve left the room to go elsewhere in the submarine…boom! Sometimes literally! While it can get really frustrating thinking “why can’t I get to this part?” it’s actually a great explanation once you’ve advanced to the next chapter, it doesn’t feel cheap. It also does a great job of starting with and sustaining that slightly spooky mood. Despite the logic-based puzzles and the rational deductions, something not quite of this world looms over the entire affair.

Most of the soundtrack, composed by Raphael Benjamin Meyer, is focused on deep, low-pitched strings, an occasional ghostly vocalization or lonely tin whistle, percussion that I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole trying to identify. And then you go in totally the opposite direction with some of the character’s themes, which range from an innocent music-box lullaby for Symmetry to a chaotic ragtime for himbo actor extraordinaire Dirk Dansom.

The only other thing that really frustrated me were frequent allusions to Tangle Tower, both when looking at clues, and when Sally speaks of “friends”, people they met during their last case. You still don’t have to know anything about the previous game to understand the story of The Mermaid Mask, nor do those references take away from the enjoyment of the game. But I’m about to be out another twenty bucks so that I can play that one too, I guess!

Alyssa played The Mermaid Mask on Nintendo Switch with her own bought copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.