Point-and-click detective games have been enjoying something of a renaissance. Recent indie titles like The Roottrees are Dead (2025), The Séance of Blake Manor (2025), and of the Devil (2025–) manage to capture the delight of a successful deduction with quality-of-life features that mean you might actually roll credits without having to follow a step-by-step guide.
Duppy Detective Tashia, by Jamaica-based “micro-studio” Spritewrench, is the latest contribution to this lineage, offering a unique spin on the genre with its Jamaican setting and characters inspired by Caribbean folklore. You play as a young woman named Tashia who finds herself in Halfway Market, a gathering place of duppy, which the game explains is “a word of African origin commonly used in various Caribbean islands” to refer to ghosts or spirits. Tashia discovers that her granny’s ghost stories were real. The Archangel Michael—or “Mikey” to his friends—tasks Tashia with solving the murder of Bredda Anansi, the trickster spider of Jamaican folklore.
Duppy Detective features a whimsical but heartfelt story about the importance of keeping storytelling traditions alive. Players unfamiliar with the folklore of this part of the world can discover what Granny Thelma has told Tashia about these characters in the “People” menu. For instance, Mistah Doyle is described as “a supernatural being disguised as a human sent to collect debts owed to the Obeahman.”
Each character has distinctive habits of speech, vocabulary, and pronunciation. As someone who has never been to Jamaica, I sometimes struggled to imagine the intended delivery. It would have been incredible to have heard these lines spoken by Caribbean actors, but that was surely out of scope for this self-published title.
Even within the point-and-click genre, the game’s interactivity is on the low side. The player can only choose what people/places to interact with; there aren’t dialogue choices within conversations. The first time Tashia finds an item, she can select which of the five senses to examine it with. Sometimes the game will ask you whether you wish to use a particular item in your possession. But there aren’t many items, and they can’t be used in combination. The simplicity of the gameplay makes this an appealing title for players new to the genre, but veterans may hanker for more challenge or for more novel mechanics. Given the game’s focus on story and aesthetics, I would have appreciated the ability to choose Tashia’s responses, even if these choices didn’t affect the outcome of the investigation.
Classic point-and-click adventures have notoriously arcane moments. I can still remember wandering about Scabb Island in Monkey Island 2 (1991) as a kid, having no idea what I was supposed to do. Duppy Detective, like many of its contemporaries, is much more approachable. The game keeps track of your discoveries so you won’t need a pencil and paper. A pop-up in the left-hand corner of the screen lets you know when the in-game database has been updated, though I wish these only appeared the first time a particular piece of information was given.
At the end of important conversations, Tashia will often recommend who to talk to or where to go to advance the investigation. Players new to the genre may appreciate this guidance. However, experienced players might want to connect the dots themselves. These suggestions may have worked better as hints that could be triggered in the pause menu or by talking to an NPC if players get stuck.
Despite these quality-of-life features, there was one point in my playthrough when I was unsure what I needed to do to progress the story. I found myself interacting with characters and locations multiple times in the hope of unlocking new dialogue or uncovering new clues. A clearer indication when characters have more to say would have been appreciated.
I do hesitate to say too much about the mystery or deductions for fear of spoilers. There were points where you needed to accuse someone with insufficient information, which didn’t feel great. And when the culprit was revealed in the end, I didn’t feel like I contributed much to that revelation.
The game’s art direction, particularly its character art, is a standout feature. It opens with the above animated cutscene by ListenMi Studios (also based in Jamaica). Each character has a distinctive design with multiple comically exaggerated portraits that reflect the narrative context.
Spritewrench’s long-time collaborator, composer Chase Bethea, is back. For Duppy Detective, his brief was to “deliver a score that felt cinematic, noir-inspired, distinctly Caribbean, and unsettling at once.” Bethea has christened the result (available on Bandcamp) “Caribbean Noir.” The mixture of African and new-world elements—djembe and aslatua shakers, electric bass, and xylophone—suits both the setting and the gameplay, though I wish the main gameplay music looped seamlessly.
Sound effects could have supported gameplay more than they did. I would have appreciated a sound associated with Tashia making important discoveries. Hearing the “puzzle solved” sound in Zelda not only lets players know they did something significant but is like a reward in and of itself. Each character has distinctive “beep speech,” but it doesn’t respond to the emotional register of conversations like Power Up Audio’s dialogue to Celeste (2018).
The pre-release build I played (version 1.01) was free from game-breaking bugs but not from visual glitches. In Chapter 1, the lightbulbs indicating new information in the “People” menu lingered on the map screen and subsequent conversations until I examined an item. Some text in later chapters didn’t initially appear in the correct location. And yellow text appeared as black and then changed colour. The game doesn’t currently support cloud saves, but given its length, this isn’t going to be a problem for most players.
I recommend Duppy Detective Tashia to players who are interested in Caribbean folklore and an approachable, single-sitting mystery. Its Steam page advertises a 2–3-hour playtime, but I rolled credits in less than an hour. Due to the lack of dialogue choices and consequences for one’s decisions, I suspect most players will find little replay value.
