Detective games on your phone

A detective game where you do the detecting

A lot of mystery games on mobile are hidden-object hunts or stories that solve themselves while you tap. Last Text gives you the evidence and nothing else. The deduction is yours.

What makes a good detective game

• Fair clues. Everything you need to solve it is in front of you. No twist pulled out of nowhere in the last minute.
• Real deduction. You connect a time stamp to an alibi, a photo to a lie. The game doesn’t highlight the clue for you.
• A cost for guessing. If you can click through every answer until one is right, you’re not detecting. You’re guessing.
• A satisfying reveal. When the truth comes out, you should be able to look back and see that it was there all along.

How Last Text plays

Each case is a stranger’s phone. You read their chats, emails, voicemails, notes and photos, in any order. The phone’s clock moves on as you read, so the evidence keeps arriving: a new message, a missed call, a photo someone shouldn’t have sent.

When you think you know who did it, or what someone is hiding, you make your accusation. You get one chance:

• Wrong: the case is over and you see the truth.
• Right: 200 points plus an early bonus of up to 300. The rest of the story plays out.
• Then prove it: five questions about how and why, 100 points each.

So the real decision in every case is when to stop reading. Accuse early and score more, or wait for more proof and play it safe.

Kinds of detective games on mobile

If you like detective games, it helps to know which kind you’re after:

• Hidden object games: find items in busy scenes. Relaxing, but the mystery mostly happens around you.
• Escape room games: logic puzzles and locks. More puzzle than investigation.
• Story and chat games: a mystery told through conversations, often with choices along the way.
• Found phone games: you go through someone’s phone and piece it together yourself. That’s Last Text. More about found phone games.

Murder, scams and secrets

Three of the five cases are murders: a grandmother on a tidal island, a chef in a Brooklyn walk-in and the man who held an old mine claim, who drives into the outback and doesn’t come back. The other two are a romance scam and an engaged man with a second phone. All of them are fiction.