Lucy recommends: The Granny Detective Society
The great mouse detective 🔍
Hey folks, and welcome to the weekend!
It's no secret that I love a detective game, and I have really fun one for you to try today: The Granny Detective Society. The demo has been out for a little while and it received a hefty update this week, complete with a UI/UX overhaul, the option to add notes to your investigation board, and redesigns of other key features like the journal (a detective's greatest tool!).
But the most exciting part is that the team added a brand new puzzle to celebrate a recent wishlist milestone. You can unlock this puzzle after you've finished the demo by dialing a special number on Madeleine's phone, and completing it can get your name in the game's credits. The team asked if I could provide the number to call, so make sure to keep reading!
More about it after the jump, including a really lovely chat with its developers, and a slightly reflective piece from me.
A cozy investigation game where you observe a street, pin down its residents’ secrets, and solve mysteries. Play as Madeleine, a retired granny recruited by the Granny Detective Society (basically the CIA… but with dentures), investigating a neighborhood that hides its secrets well.
If you like extra newsletters, game code giveaways, and to join a Discord full of really cool indie video game enjoyers, then hit the button below to become an LFG Supporter!
Here's a little hint at next week's Discord giveaway: 🍕🐢🥷
What is The Granny Detective Society?
There's a grand conspiracy waiting to be unmasked, and the only people capable of doing so are members of The Granny Detective Society, of course.
Keep an eye out for unusual goings on in the neighborhood, piece together evidence, and blow the case wide open.
Why it caught my eye
It was my birthday this week, and it proved to be quite a reflective one.
It wasn't a particularly big birthday despite waking up to an email from my aunt congratulating me on hitting the halfway to 70 milestone (is that a thing we celebrate these days?), and I had a lovely time celebrating both with a solo fun day out and then time with my friends. Growing older is a pleasure and a privilege: I'm happier and more confident in myself than I've ever been, work is going well (thanks to you all!), I have wonderful friends, and yeah, my back hurts a little sometimes, but overall, life is great. It was a lovely birthday.
I started playing The Granny Detective Society, and I thought I knew exactly what I was in for: a cozy and quirky detective game where you solve crimes as grannies (which the game absolutely delivers on!). What I wasn't prepared for was the air of melancholy in the game's opening. Madeleine opens the game reflecting on the rich life she's led: her friends, her hectic job, travel, all the incredible experiences life has given her. She didn't have regrets, why would she? She led an incredible life, but the path she had chosen hadn't left time for marriage or a partnership, or children. She was reckoning with that.
And I unexpectedly reckoned with it a little bit too.
It's rare to have elderly people be main characters in a game*, let alone ones that don't follow the "traditional" path that our parents followed. I'm not elderly by any means (unless you ask my nieces, maybe), but with a lot of my friends getting married and starting families, it did feel really... nice to play as a character in a similar boat to me. No partner, no kids, but still immensely satisfied with where their life has taken them, and content in themselves. Madeleine may not have a family, but she does find friends, and purpose. It was a pleasant reminder that you can be okay by yourself, and that liking yourself goes a long, long way. It unexpectedly resonated with me a lot.
In video games, you can be anything you want to be, and for once, it was just nice to be someone you could be.
*If you want to see more, check out Forever Ago from Annapurna which is coming out in October.
For fans of...
Duck Detective, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol
(it's like this game was made in a lab just for me)
Try it yourself!
How to unlock the new puzzle!
As I mentioned up top, developer Team Empreintes has added a brand new puzzle for this demo, and asked me for a special four-digit number to dial in-game to unlock it. I picked 3018 because it's the two dates I brought my cats home (30th Jan and 18th Feb). Here's a quick word from the devs with more info:
"After solving the main investigation, relaunch your game. You will find that a new screen has been unlocked: the telephone.
Dial 3018 and you will unlock a mysterious sticky note that leads into a sequence of four exclusive puzzles built around our detective board. Solve them, and you will discover more about our heroine's past.
And that is not all: if you complete this bonus investigation, you will have the opportunity to add your own name to the game's credits. Isn't life grand?"
A word from the developers...
Huge thank you to Jaximus and Vidu for taking the time to answer my questions, and provide such thoughtful answers!
LFG: What are the origins of the studio and how many folks are working on the game?
Team Empreintes: We are Jaximus and Vidu, the two people behind Team Empreintes, an independent studio based in Angoulême, France, which we founded in 2024.
We love creating non-violent games that place emotion at the heart of the experience, with original gameplay mechanics that venture off the beaten path. On The Granny Detective Society, we share responsibility for the project's creative vision: the writing, game direction, investigation mechanics, and, more broadly, our desire to create an experience that feels heartfelt, intriguing, and a little surprising.
So there are two of us at the heart of both the studio and the game's development, although we occasionally bring in outside collaborators to help with specific aspects of the project. And the entire game is self-funded!
Where did the idea for The Granny Detective Society come from?
With Fireside Feelings, we explored empathy and shifts in perspective through intimate questions shared between people. For our next game, we wanted to keep working with this idea of changing perspectives, but approach it from a new angle: community.
I think we all share the sense that there is one common reality, but as many ways of experiencing and interpreting it as there are people observing it. Yet when we remain trapped inside our own worldview, it can be difficult to seek out other people's perspectives; sometimes to the point of forgetting just how complex and varied their experiences truly are.
We therefore looked for a narrative framework that would allow players to experience this idea directly through gameplay. We needed a group of investigators, each of whom could bring a different perspective to the same scene. That was when we thought of the fairly universal image of grandmothers spending time at their windows and somehow always knowing everything that is happening in their building or neighborhood.
This image appears in many cultures around the world, and it has always made us smile. So we decided to take it one step further: “What if it wasn't merely curiosity? What if they actually belonged to a vast, secret spy organisation?”
The fantasy of playing as a grandmother-spy immediately made us giggle like children who had just got up to mischief behind their grandparents' backs. That was when we knew we were onto something.
Are there any particular gameplay inspirations you drew from?
Absolutely. Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, and Duck Detective are among our main references when it comes to detective games. At first, though, we had a rather narrow view of the genre. To us, these were the kinds of games where you had to keep a wiki open on the side just to understand the slightly twisted logic of the person who had painstakingly designed them. We couldn't have been more wrong!
Our first real introduction to the genre was Return of the Obra Dinn, and it completely blew us away. Within the first few minutes, we had no doubt that we were playing a landmark video game. We discovered The Case of the Golden Idol next and became completely addicted to the genre. We have had a very hard time stopping ever since!
Duck Detective has also been incredibly important to us. We were lucky enough to meet the team at Happy Broccoli, who have offered us a tremendous amount of advice and support since the early days of the project. We adore their game, and they hold a very special place in our hearts.
Visually, however, we mainly wanted to continue what we had begun with Fireside Feelings, our first game. We love its soft, gentle, stylized world; especially because it creates what we feel is an interesting contrast with the depth of the investigations and gameplay mechanics.
Despite the game being so funny and quirky, there's an air of melancholy at the beginning, and a commentary on what it's like to age out of work, and life not having gone the "traditional way" (i.e., having children or a partner). Can you elaborate on this aspect of the game and why it's so important?
From our very first approach to the project, we wanted to offer a dynamic, contemporary portrayal of older people, rather than representing them exclusively through illness, death, or frailty.
And I think we were heading in the right direction, because when our first demo came out in January 2026, we received a message from an 82-year-old player. After telling us about a few bugs she had encountered, she explained how happy and moved she had been to discover a game that portrayed older people in precisely this way. Her message was incredibly touching and reinforced just how important this approach was to us.
At the same time, we belong to a generation that is constantly reflecting on masculinity, femininity, and the life paths society considers “traditional.” When we write a character, it feels natural to place these questions at the heart of the story, simply because they run through our lives, our conversations, and our thoughts.
Madeleine is very much a product of those reflections. She is a woman who has lived a full but solitary life. She completely embraces her past and is deeply happy with it. When she looks back, she smiles at everything she has experienced. She never needed anyone else in order to feel fulfilled or to become the funny, intelligent, charismatic woman she is.
At the same time, she is more than a fantasy of a strong woman. She is also a retiree with a very clear-eyed view of her own circumstances. Her wonderfully dry sense of humor allows her both to throw herself into the extraordinary adventure offered by the Granny Detective Society and to retain a certain distance from herself and the sheer absurdity of what she is going through. She approaches it all with equal parts humor and tenderness.
When we take that thought even further, we sometimes feel that Madeleine is a kind of predictive self-portrait of the older people we might one day become. When we eventually look back over all the games we have made, we will probably smile as we remember those wonderful years spent creating them. But somewhere inside us, we may also retain that little fear that we missed out on something by devoting so much time and energy to our passion.
I love the tactile nature of the demo: taking photos, using the cork board and dialing the phone. Why is that so important and how hard was it to implement?
We are incredibly happy that you noticed this aspect of the game, because it is something we have been thinking about since the very beginning and continue to approach with a great deal of care!
For example, we spent an enormous amount of time creating a piece of string with a genuine sense of physicality when it connects the Polaroids. We wanted it to have weight, to feel playful to manipulate, and to evoke the hands-on, almost artisanal quality of Madeleine's detective work.
Over the course of our lives, we have worked in many different fields: comic books, animated film, live performance, and more. Along the way, we learned something that has profoundly shaped how we think about every art form we practice: before creating a work in any medium, you should always ask what makes that particular medium unique.
In our case, that means asking: what can a video game convey that another medium could not convey in quite the same way? For us, one answer lies in the interaction between the player and the game. Watching somebody dial a number on an old rotary phone is not the same as turning that dial yourself, one number at a time.
We are therefore very attached to these tactile interactions and try to give them as much attention as we possibly can. Of course, we also have to work within the limits of our time and budget, because making these interactions feel weighty and satisfying takes a great deal of work.
What kinds of crimes will the grannies be investigating?
We may be playing as a delightful band of grandmothers who are as adorable as they are eccentric, but make no mistake: this is about saving the world. Nothing more, nothing less!
At first, the investigations players must solve may seem like a series of small, unrelated incidents. In reality, however, they are all part of a vast conspiracy that will gradually have to be uncovered, one with profound consequences for Madeleine's world.
So move over, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, and Moriarty. Make way for the Granny Detective Society—and the shadowy rival organisation standing in their path!
Who do you hope this game reaches?
Without a doubt: anyone who has, or once had, a grandmother. By our calculations, that should come to roughly nine billion people. Give or take.
More seriously, players who enjoy a proper challenge, carefully crafted dialogue, and mysteries of every stripe should feel right at home in The Granny Detective Society: like children visiting their grandparents for lunch. The table will be laden with delicious dishes made with love, and once dessert is over, they will probably need a good nap to digest it all!
That is the goal, anyway. ;)
Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy the demo as much as I did! Have a fabulous weekend, and I'll see you next week.