The Doringbult Detective key art
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In development · Steam page coming soon

The Doringbult Detective

Everyone blames the baboon. Somebody has to check.

  • Detective
  • Narrative
  • Mystery
Status  In developmentSteam page  In review, coming soonSetting  Small-town South Africa, present dayCases  Five
The hook

“Small town. Smaller crimes. One meerkat.”

Doringbult is the kind of town where the bottle store closes for lunch, the sergeant knows your mother, and a missing koeksister recipe is front-page news. Hendrik Stokstert left years ago. Now he is back, with a notebook, and everyone would like him to hurry up and blame the baboon.

The Doringbult Detective is a deduction game in the Golden Idol and Duck Detective family: explore hand-illustrated rooms, pick up words, and fill in the blanks until the sentence is true. Five cases, one town, and a cast of Southern African animals who are all absolutely certain they saw nothing.

The Doringbult Detective poster
Coming up

The trailer is on its way.

The Steam page is in review. Once it goes live, the trailer lands here and on the STANDER YouTube channel the same day. Until then, the town is keeping quiet. It is good at that.

case file: Doringbult

Status: in development.
Genre: narrative detective mystery.
Notes: everyone blames the baboon. Somebody has to check.

How it plays

Key mechanics.

01

Five cases

From a stolen recipe to a land deal nobody wants to talk about. Each case is its own puzzle, and the town remembers what you found in the last one.

02

The notebook

Clues become keywords. Keywords fill blanks. When the sentence reads true, the case closes. When it does not, the sergeant sighs.

03

A town of suspects

A warthog sergeant, a guineafowl auntie, a jackal estate agent, a baboon who is blamed for everything and guilty of nothing. Probably.

04

Deadpan noir, small stakes

Rain on a tin roof, a windmill in the dusk, and a crime that would not make the news anywhere else. It makes the news here.

The Doringbult Detective

Somebody has to check.