What We Are Playing [July 2026]
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
This month's What Are We Playing features games ranging from a five-chapter treasure hunt to a murder mystery that feels straight out of 2009.
Dead Man's Tale is a paper pop-up adventure that unfolds across five distinct chapters. The props and production design are impressive. Some components hold up beautifully throughout play, but a few are a bit fragile to handle. Unfortunately, some of these elaborately designed components feel underutilized for how interesting they look.
Most puzzle solutions come together smoothly without hints, but there are a few stretches where confirming a correct path takes longer than warranted. It's helpful to have each chapter's solution be self-confirming, even if decoding them is mildly tedious. The puzzle difficulty and complexity feel a bit uneven at times. There are many layered puzzles that are quite clever, while a handful feel somewhat finicky in their logic. One note for anyone picking this up: keep good notes as you go. Information from earlier chapters resurfaces later, and it's easy to lose track of where you are without it.
Difficulty: 3/5
Time: ~1 hour per chapter (total ~5 hours)
The Archives of Trevosa is a deduction game that is recognizably influenced by The Roottrees Are Dead, Chants of Sennaar, and keyword-searching games like Her Story and Telling Lies. The puzzling centers around deducing the meanings of words based on context clues, figuring out family relationships, and scouring documents in the archive to find connections between characters. For a free game, the polish is genuinely surprising. Anyone who already likes this style of deduction will get pulled in fast, and hold on until the entire family tree is resolved. If you're a fan of this genre, give this game a try. It's a solid couple of hours of puzzling for the very reasonable price of free!
Difficulty: 3/5
Time: ~2 hours
ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies is one of several spiritual successors to Disco Elysium (a psychological RPG that is mentioned in nearly every blog post because I keep seeking out other games like it). This publisher went through a drama-filled split after the release of Disco, which is a valid reason for hesitation. Could the studio release a game similar in quality with most of the original creative team gone? The answer to that is yes. While the setting may be different from Disco Elysium, the tone, visual language, and gameplay feel very similar. This makes it hard to call the game an innovation on its predecessor, but that can't be the base metric for judging all games. For anyone who enjoys this style of writing-heavy RPG, the thirty hours of gameplay go by fast! Though derivative (by design), Zero Parades feels thoughtfully conceived and well-written. Characters have distinct personalities, and interactions are often consequential. A few branches converge on the same destination from different routes, and a small reward for finding all paths would be a nice touch. Some skill checks feel harder than necessary, and the resource system for tracking basic needs gets a bit frustrating at times. A few more side quests and unhinged plotlines would round things out, though there's enough weirdness woven in to keep things interesting. While it doesn't really break new ground, there's plenty it does well, and I am thoroughly here for it. Difficulty: N/A
Time: ~30 hours
Studio Stump's Fallen Star is a classic tabletop murder mystery built around paper props and companion websites that are styled to look like they're straight out of 2009. The retro website design leans into early social platforms like Myspace, which may bring a pinch of nostalgia to millennial players. The site interface feels clunky in places, but is functional overall. The clues themselves feel fair throughout, with just enough misdirection to create doubt before finding all of the evidence. Most of the case came together for us without needing hints, but we did manage to miss a few things along the way. Sometimes it was hard to know if we had found everything—for example, a few pages required login credentials, and it wasn't always clear how many individual accounts we had access to.
The hints are useful and incremental, but not the most intuitive to use. A few confusing details caused some hang-ups along the way, but we solved the case in the end. The physical materials are good quality: photos printed on actual photo paper, handwriting that reads like handwriting, etc. There aren't any non-paper materials, but it's clear that every component was designed with intent. Difficulty: 2/5
Time: ~1.5 hours
Dispatch is a story-driven video game, built around light puzzle elements and strategic choice-making. The premise puts you in charge of dispatching a team of superheroes made up of former villains.
Gameplay revolves around upgrading skills for your roster and deciding who to send on what mission during dispatch shifts. Those shifts move at a faster pace than the cut scenes, and they work well as a kind of mini-game, never overstaying their welcome. Most of the eight episodes include two shifts, with cut scenes and dialog choices filling the space between. Heroes level up by successfully completing their tasks. The puzzle-style "hacking" sequences range from fun to frustrating depending on how much quick timing is required. Some of the quick-time events feel a bit too quick, and leave little time to read the prompts.
The comic book art style is well-executed, and makes sense for the superhero theme. Natural break points are provided through the episodic structure. The animated sequences are a highlight, and the story stays character-focused rather than leaning on superhero action to progress the narrative. The writing is quite funny, and, along with the dispatching gameplay itself, is one of the stronger elements of the game.
Difficulty: 2/5
Time: ~11 hours (~45m per episode)
What are you playing this month?