Apple Crumble review: a Knives Out-style mystery designed for nosy families

On a kitchen table in a fictional English country house, an elderly woman arranges a plate of sliced apples with the focused calm of someone preparing an alibi. The plate belongs to grandma, and grandma, the developer of Apple Crumble wants you to understand, is the centre of a problem. Not a gentle, baking-soda-and-rosemary problem. A murder problem. Specifically: someone is planning to kill her, and you, the player, are the only person in the room who knows.

Apple Crumble is the second mystery game from Happy Broccoli Games, the small studio behind Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, a 2024 point-and-click comedy that became one of indie gaming's quiet commercial surprises. Where Duck Detective was a shaggy, absurd parody of detective fiction, Apple Crumble is what its developer describes as a "sad grandma game" with a darker edge: a Knives Out-inflected whodunnit, or, more precisely, who-plans-to-do-it, built around surveillance, suspicion, and a cast of relatives who all have reasons to want grandma gone.

The genre has rarely been so well suited to a domestic setting. Murder mysteries, in their gilded Hercule Poirot and Jessica Fletcher modes, trade on the suspicion that wealth and inheritance make everyone in the room a suspect. Apple Crumble flips that premise into something uncomfortably modern. Here, the murder is not a curiosity staged in a mansion. It is a quiet family crisis, and the suspects are the people you already know. The game's central mechanic, snooping through family members' phones, drawers, photo albums, and chat histories, is positioned not as exotic detective work but as the thing families actually do when they think no one is watching. Happy Broccoli has made a game about the surveillance that families perform on one another, dressed up as a whodunnit.

The detective is a relative, not a stranger

The framing is deliberate. The player character in Apple Crumble is a member of the family, not a hired outsider; the role of sleuth falls to you precisely because you are already inside the house. That inversion does a lot of work. It removes the conventional alibi of the visiting detective, the figure who arrives from elsewhere and can therefore claim objectivity, and forces the player into the more uncomfortable position of insider. Happy Broccoli has said the game is "about the people you love being complicated", and the design respects that framing. There are no clean strangers to interrogate. Every suspect is also someone whose birthday you are expected to remember.

That structural choice has narrative consequences. In a Knives Out plot, the audience enjoys the spectacle of a wealthy patriarch's family being exposed as venal and ridiculous, secure in the knowledge that they themselves are not in the room. Apple Crumble refuses that comfort. The targets of suspicion are not a farcical clan of Manhattan heirs. They are the kinds of relatives a player might actually have: the cousin with a gambling debt, the niece who has come back from university with opinions, the sibling who stayed home to do the caring. The game's tonal gambit is to ask the player to enjoy the same voyeuristic pleasure Duck Detective offered, and then to make that pleasure feel slightly squalid.

The mechanics of nosiness

Gameplay is structured around investigation cycles that lean heavily on rummaging. Players search rooms, examine objects, cross-reference diaries and text messages, and gradually assemble a working theory about who is plotting against grandma. The studio's prior work established that it has a good ear for pacing inside small spaces, and Apple Crumble extends that without breaking it. Each room in the country house is densely populated with clues that read like clues, receipts, prescriptions, postcards, an oddly expensive pair of gardening gloves, but that also read like things real families leave lying around. The dual register is the joke, and it lands.

The Knives Out comparison is most visible in how the game handles reveals. Rather than a single climactic drawing-room confrontation, Apple Crumble stages a sequence of small confrontations, each pinning one relative against their own evidence. The pleasure of those scenes is mechanical as much as narrative: you have already done the snooping, and the game simply lets you watch the consequences play out. There is a particular satisfaction in confronting a relative about a text message you only saw because you opened the wrong drawer, and the game is tuned to deliver that satisfaction on a tight loop.

The harder edge, signalled by the developer's own description of the project as a "sad grandma game", emerges gradually. Without spoiling the plot, the emotional stakes of the mystery turn out to be less about inheritance than about the limits of what family members can know about one another. The game's final movement reframes the entire snooping campaign as something the protagonist will have to live with, and it is to Happy Broccoli's credit that the moment lands without sentimental overload.

Why the timing works

Apple Crumble arrives at a moment when cozy games are beginning to absorb heavier themes. The post-Stardew wave of farm and life simulators has steadily edged into territory once considered too melancholy for the genre, illness, debt, the slow erosion of community, and mystery games have followed. The critical success of Duck Detective proved there was an audience for a point-and-click comedy whose detective was a waterfowl with a drinking problem. Apple Crumble's bet is that the same audience, having laughed at the first game, will sit still for a longer and more uncomfortable one.

The Knives Out influence is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Rian Johnson's two Knives Out films and the subsequent Glass Onion established a visual and tonal grammar for contemporary whodunnits: bright rooms, morally ugly suspects, an investigator who works the room like a standup comic. Happy Broccoli has translated that grammar into pixel art and a country-house setting, and the translation works. The studio is not parodying Knives Out so much as absorbing it into a British indie-detective lineage that runs through Her Interactive's Nancy Drew games and the better entries in the Layton catalogue, with a sensibility closer to vintage Agatha Christie than to either.

What the game is actually about

The most interesting thing about Apple Crumble is that it treats family surveillance as a shared cultural habit. The game's central joke, that snooping on relatives is the same activity whether you are doing it for love, money, or boredom, is also its most uncomfortable point. Happy Broccoli has built a detective game in which the detective's main skill is the willingness to read other people's private messages, and has chosen to set that game in the one environment where that behaviour is normalised. The result is a title that works as both a mystery and a quiet diagnostic of how families actually operate under late-modern conditions of low trust and high access.

There are limits to the conceit. The pixel-art presentation, while handsome, occasionally obscures the precise object the game expects you to click; the middle act sags slightly under the weight of suspects who could each plausibly be the villain. The darker emotional register the developer has flagged is real but understated, and players looking for the operatic tragedy of a Last of Us turn will not find it here. What they will find is a tightly written mystery with a cast of plausible suspects, a satisfying investigation loop, and a final beat that lingers longer than its small-screen proportions should allow.

For a studio that built its name on a duck with a trench coat, Apple Crumble is a confident second act. It keeps what worked about Duck Detective, pacing, voice, a sharp ear for the absurdity of domestic life, and adds a structural seriousness that the first game only flirted with. The result is a game about murder that is, in the end, mostly about the particular violence of paying close attention to the people closest to you.

This piece was filed from a single Guardian Games preview of Apple Crumble. Claims about developer intent and tone draw on Happy Broccoli Games' own framing as reported in that coverage; claims about gameplay are limited to mechanics described there.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot