Horror Mystery Carimara’s Biggest Surprise Is Its Touching Story

With some games, you know what you’re getting into right away. A fast-paced shooter or a dense strategy game might succeed by giving you exactly what you expect from it and nothing more. But others only reveal their brilliance later on, when they manage to show you something entirely new or twist your assumptions about genre as you play. That’s the case with Carimara: Beneath the forlorn limbs, a compact horror gem all about peeling apart the layers of a mystery to find all the secrets skittering beneath.

Some of what makes Carimara great is right there on the surface. Its sound and visual design are stunning, among the best I’ve encountered this year. Every texture in the game, from the floorboards to the bizarre monster designs, feels worn and real, illuminated by gorgeous candlelight and the glow of the moon. Pixelated plants sway and the clouds outside undulate, casting writhing shadows across every scene. The effect is unnerving but darkly beautiful, and the same is true of Carimara’s sound, much of which was captured in nature by developer Bastinus Rex (whose upcoming Trip is also worth keeping an eye on).

You play as a carimara, a bearded goblin with a hat made of bones inspired by the folklore of Normandy. The entire game takes place in and around a cottage in the woods, which a foul-tempered old woman has hired you to rid of a ghost residing in the basement.

All you have to accomplish that with is your wits, as you’ll gain cards representing objects and characters around the house, which then become topics of conversation. Find the rosehips growing in the garden and you can ask the old woman about them by selecting their card, or use her own card to interrogate the bloodthirsty owl in her backyard. Most conversations in the game have nothing to do with the ghost in the basement, but any one might point the way down a winding path toward a clue that could solve the mystery.

Like all the best mystery games, your investigations in Carimara feel like genuine detective work. No one can just tell you the right answer — they’re all either in the dark or have reasons not to spill their secrets right away. There are no grand confessions to tease out of the culprit or smoking guns to find lying around the shack. Instead, you gather little bits of evidence that help you build a case in your own mind for the three answers the ghost demands when you meet it below ground: who were they, who is their murderer, and what did they use to do it?

The way Carimara demands that players do their own detective work and follow their gut to the answer makes it incredibly compelling, and the fact that it can be so captivating while taking only an hour or so is all the more impressive. Even if you count deceased characters along with the carimara, who really has nothing to do with any of this, there are only half a dozen characters in the game and fewer than 20 conversation topics. But because any combination of characters and items could be the solution to the whole game. It invites you to scrutinize every single one, considering their place in this world and how they could have interacted to bring about the ghost’s untimely end. The result is a game that’s extremely dense despite taking place in so small a space, encouraging you to dig deep for anything hiding out of sight and think carefully about the significance of everything you see. When I finally solved the mystery, it came as a series of revelations that took my breath away.

Beyond aesthetics and mechanics, it’s the story that only emerges fully in its final moments that seals Carimara as one of the year’s best games. Carimara is a game about keeping secrets, and your job is to uncover them, looking past the obvious to find the truth no one dares to admit. That’s a typical setup for a detective story, with a guilty person desperate to seem innocent in the eyes of their interrogator. Carimara flips that dynamic on its head, keeping as its deepest secret not rage, but love. The game’s haunted world is steeped in horror, its plot hinting at a horrible crime. But at the moment when you’d expect the darkest twist, the final truth Carimara reveals is its surprisingly tender heart.

Carimara: Beneath the forlorn limbs is available now on PC.