The detective and mystery sub-genre of games has been having a bit of a renaissance in 2025, and I’ve been diving into a variety of interesting twists on the idea. One of the more memorable ones that has stood out to me is The Diary. From its compelling storytelling to its drag-and-drop gameplay, I became invested and curious about how the mystery would be solved.
The Diary, as a game title, is doing a lot of work. 99% of the time, you’ll be reading a diary, looking at pictures, maps, trinkets, and anecdotes inside, and coming to conclusions about the best fit of the information. You’ll be reading multiple diaries, though, not one, and each chapter shifts perspective to a different character. This gives you fresh eyes on the missing persons case that you are trying to solve. Whether you are reading from the diary of the missing, the best friend, or the police officer trying to report the outcome and deduce the course of events, each diary has its own style and unique puzzles inside.
Puzzles often return back to moving snippets of information around the screen to fill in the blanks, but the mechanisms for doing that switch up constantly. Some of it comes from observation in pictures and short video clips. Some of it comes from map reading or geographical logic puzzles. It may be using information written down in previous puzzles, or other information dotted around the diary or its cover book. You will be constantly dragging and dropping info snippets everywhere to tell the story, and once you’ve got something right, it will lock in place. In theory, this does mean that you can idly spam options to brute force your way through puzzles, but then you’ll run into music tone or photo-taking mini games that will force your participation. Considering the format, The Diary does a decent job of stopping one mechanic from ever feeling too stale, and whilst you’ll always be combing for information, it doesn’t feel repetitive.
Part of the charm is that visually, each diary is different and feels like it comes from a different character. Whether it’s the writing, the narrative tone, the photos and video clips in use, or just the format, they stand apart from each other. Without going into spoiler territory, the perspective shift keeps the story guessing, as even if I’d guessed the ending correctly, I hadn’t quite pieced together how we’d end up there. As you complete different segments of the game, mini video clips are unlocked, and by the end, they tell the entire plot in sequential order. If you’ve misunderstood something, you get the big “aha” moment, which I found personally satisfying and also a really great narrative twist to give the game a definitive ending. Speaking of the story, whilst the artwork is colourful, vibrant, and cartoony, the story goes into some very dark places. Someone has gone missing after all, and this story doesn’t shy away from the missing-turned-murder arcs many of these cases become. The narrative is handled tastefully and well, whilst keeping it gritty.
The Diary took me three hours to complete and is a linear but memorable story. It was a little shorter than I expected, but as the game heavily relies on observational puzzles, and I’m quite good at those, I think others may be a bit slower. I did run into a couple of glitches where selecting parts of the user interface either didn’t trigger or triggered but froze me in place, meaning I couldn’t move on. These were solved with a quick restart, but occasionally, I still found some of the UI unclear. This caused an issue most whenever there was a map-related puzzle, as sometimes the selections you make aren’t aligned perfectly to the option they relate to. I wasn’t always sure my option was toggled on or off. These were minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things, but they did slow me down a little.
What makes The Diary compelling is its perspective-shifting narrative, distinctive diary-core artwork, and its breadcrumb-style puzzles. Every page is something to solve, so you’ll never have to rely on an exposition dump of more than 30 seconds before your next challenge. I enjoyed The Diary, and whilst it won’t be the hardest mystery to solve, it was one I willingly solved with open eyes and a skip in my step.
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