Labyrinth City Pierre the Maze Detective

Pierre the Maze Detective began as a series of picture books from Japanese illustration studio IC4DESIGN — dense double-page spreads packed with hidden objects and tiny stories. This adaptation by Paris-based Darjeeling preserves that approach faithfully: each level started life as one of the book's illustrations, and the game just lets you walk Pierre through it.

The plot is a museum heist with stakes. Mr. X has stolen the Maze Stone, an artifact that turns the area around it into a labyrinth, and Pierre has to chase him through Opera City, a haunted mansion, a castle in the sky and several other settings before reality dissolves into corridors entirely. Each scene hides over a hundred objects and roughly five hundred small interactions with characters and items in the background.

Darjeeling — founded in 2009 by Marc Lustigman and Noam Roubah — built its reputation on Californium (2016) and Homo Machina (2018), which won Best Mobile Game at Game Connection America. IC4DESIGN, founded by Hirofumi Kamigaki in Hiroshima in 1998, brings the visual style that won Cannes Lions Bronze and a D&AD wood pencil in 2017. An original score and localisation across ten languages round out an unusually painterly puzzle game.