Detective Grimoire
Worth it · Narrative · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $6.99.
- Length
- 2.4h
- Value
- $2.91/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, On-board graphics, 205 MB of storage. Windows only.
Detective Grimoire has been called to investigate a murder. The owner of a small tourist attraction, seemingly killed by the mythical creature his attraction is based around... Explore the area, inspect the crime scene, grill suspects, solve puzzles, hunt for clues & uncover the secret of the swamp!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
November 2016 is where it bottomed out, at $1.39. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 82 in the 12 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 98 percent of its genre. Among the games closest to it, Loco Motive ($17.99, scores 73) and Strange Horticulture ($15.99, scores 76) both come in lower.
Steam's global achievement data puts 63 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Of the 338 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 125 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
80% start to 63% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
3 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
A decent addition to the later (and better) games in the series, but not worth buying on its own. Very much showing that it came first - pretty rough around the edges. Might be worth getting as part of a bundle. Otherwise, not really.
Came to the origin after Tangle Tower, though this review is written after Mermaid's Mask. I actually found this story more enjoyable than the Tangle Tower case, despite its artistic shortcomings. You can see a lot of the series' roots in Secret of the Swamp. Gameplay is similar to later titles, although the UI and art assets are dated. Same humorous and witty writing. Same good animation and fun theatrical voice...
I think as a mystery game, it's pretty simple. It really shines with the characters and the dialogue, as they're chock-full of charm and entertainment. The game is a nice and short, and feels pretty representative of people who have been making point-and-click Flash games on Newgrounds back in the early 2000s. It's even got Dan McNeely and Egoraptor!
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Detective Grimoire scores 84/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/272600/detective-grimoireThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.