One of my favourite sleeper genres that has been growing across 2025 is the detective and investigation genre. Often, they are about murders or crimes, but The Case of the Worst Day Ever takes a more comedic stab at the genre. In this game, we’ll follow 10 family members and pets who are busy getting ready for a family celebration, but the photo taken at the end of the day shows everyone completely miserable. Each chapter is an investigation into how they all had their worst day ever.
The Case of the Worst Day Ever is a game that has two distinct layers of investigation to it. Each chapter presents you with a scene that spans several screens, full of characters and objects to click on and interact with. As you do this, each item or person will either have a description about them or something to read, like a poster, flyer, or timetable. Scattered across all this written text are underlined words, and if you click on them, you’ll collect them. They’ll be names, verbs, or descriptors, and each word type has its own colour. These words are then taken to the deduction area for the second part of the game, where you’ll use the words to fill in the blanks. You’ll need to name everyone, maybe solve a few who did what questions, and then ultimately fill in the blank narrative about what caused this main character’s day to go sour. You can try to brute force your way with guesses, but with careful observation to catch visual clues and narrative misalignments, you’ll be able to solve each case logically. You just have to pay attention and make notes as you go.
What I love about this game is its British slapstick and mildly saucy humour. The granny is somehow accidentally rumbling a love triangle at bingo. The dogs are all trying to escape the kennels and look rabid. The kids are busy being teased or embarrassed. The wife is trying to sell lots of trash through a pyramid scheme and it has gone horribly wrong. No one is getting murdered, and the whole setup is lighthearted with lots of drama, arm waving, and campy silliness. Whilst there is no voice acting, the hand-drawn visuals sell the comical world excellently. The puzzles themselves reward player attention, too. As you move from chapter to chapter, characters reappear and crop up with storylines across them, meaning if you read everything previously, it can give you a slight upper hand in future chapters. It gives the story and the world a bit of substance that would be missing in lesser, bittier games.
I also like that if you do get stuck, you can turn on auto-collection of words and a “how much did I get right?” option whenever you submit your final case notes. I managed to complete the game without hints, but I wrote copious notes on my way to victory. There is an in-game notepad, but I found that not being able to view it and my deduction board at the same time was a bit annoying, so I opted for analogue notes instead. My only other critique is that a few of the chapters have some similar mechanics that revolve around spotting mistakes in a pattern or an order of something. Late in the game, there’s a great switch-up by jumping back and forth in time, and I’d have loved to have seen more use of that mechanic.
Delightful fun and with plenty of observation and logic puzzles to unpick, I had a great time with The Case of the Worst Day Ever. Buying this will definitely avoid you befalling a similar fate. Bright, colourful, comedic, and satisfying. Don’t pass this by because of its lighthearted story and setting. It’s a blast.
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