When I began this blog, I’d intended to write about detective games as well as books and short stories. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get round to it in 2023, but I hope to make up for this in 2024! I’ll make up for it a bit right now by introducing you to a raft of new short, mostly free, detective games made by small teams or even a single person. Many of them are even playable within your web browser.

I don’t know how familiar my readers will be with the concept of “game jams”, so I’ll explain them quickly: Participants make games based on a certain theme, all within a time limit. Often this is a few days, but in this case, entrants had two-and-a-bit weeks to make a whole game on the theme of detection.

Now, I’d have really loved to be able to tell you about the awesome game I made for this jam, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to untangle my ideas in time; maybe someday I’ll return to my idea and make something of it.
That aside, there are 80 detective games listed as entries. Now I’m yet to actually play any, but I’ll highlight a few of my favourites in future posts. They probably won’t be polished and beautiful crime-solving gems; they were made in a few weeks, after all (some of them have been updated after the jam, though). But game jams have a way of bringing out creativity and of getting people to try new and exciting things.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to finding out what cryptic crimes and mysterious game mechanics people have come up with!

The list of jam submissions is here:
https://itch.io/jam/the-case-of-the-thinky-game-jam/entries
And here’s some information about the jam itself, and about detective games:
https://itch.io/jam/the-case-of-the-thinky-game-jam
Thinky Games is a website all about games that involve sittin’ and thinkin’, rather than lightning-fast reaction times:
https://thinkygames.com/