Image: Nicolás G. Cid Delgado

There has been a barrage of fantastic deductive mystery games these past few years (with The Incident at Galley House being a personal favourite), most seemingly building on the incredibly smart puzzle structure of Return of the Obra Dinn. Today, we've got one more–Funeral for the Sun–inviting aspiring sleuths to bend time and piece together family trees and relationship maps across the messy, centuries-long history of a Latin American town, in a case inspired by real history, with a bit of a supernatural twist.

The official line is that a fire somehow managed to wipe the town of Cerro Milagroso from existence. Every single resident died or disappeared except for a single survivor. Obviously there's something sketchy with that story, but with only one witness, you've not exactly got a lot of leads. Except that this is an Obra Dinn-like adventure, and that means we're doing spooky magical shenanigans to dig around through time and space! And this time on an impressively complex scale, with over seventy characters to snoop on across multiple eras.

And so you've got a game about witnessing scenes from the distant past. Snapshots in time, delivered in evocative watercolor comic art, full of loose, sketchy pencil lines and colors bleeding across lines. You can identify people and put their faces in your notebook, but who they actually are remains a mystery until you listen in on a conversation that mentions them, or some other hint as to their identity, helping you piece together who did what, where, why, and how.

The Obra Dinn inspirations run deep here, especially in the game's focus on identifying the correct names of characters in the scenes you'll look back on, with correct guesses only confirmed after you've done enough right in a row, so as to prevent brute-force solutions. Good design for a game like this.

One interesting twist here that goes beyond the Obra Dinn formula is that the story here takes place over centuries, which means characters can change a lot in appearance through time. Identifying a youth who grew up to be an old man, or tracing back someone's knowledge and motivations to something they saw in their childhood is key, and you can combine these temporally strained characters into a single piece on your increasingly tangled board of connections. The demo for this one was highly praised, and I can't see the full game stumbling. One more for the sleuth shelf, then.

Funeral for the Sun is out now for £16/$20, with a 10% launch discount until November 16th. It's also available in a discount bundle with the excellent The Roottrees Are Dead, and in a three-game package with recent mystery adventures Confidential Killings and Legion Was Here. It's also worth a mention that the demo is still available, if you want to give this one a peek before you dive any deeper.