Video Game / Mystery Case Files

You be the detective.

Mystery Case Files is a series of Casual Video Games from Big Fish Studios, Elephant Games, Eipix Entertainment and Grandma Studios. Despite its title and slogan, no actual sleuthing occurs; it's actually a Hidden Object Game, a genre which became popular with this series.

There are currently twenty-six main games in the series for home computer:

• Huntsville
• Prime Suspects
• Ravenhearst
• Madame Fate
• Return To Ravenhearst
• Dire Grove
• 13th Skull
• Escape From Ravenhearst
• Shadow Lake
• Fate's Carnival
• Dire Grove Sacred Grove
• Key to Ravenhearst
• Ravenhearst Unlocked
• Broken Hour
• The Black Veil
• The Revenant's Hunt
• Rewind
• The Countess
• Moths to a Flame
• Black Crown
• The Harbinger
• Crossfade
• Incident at Pendle Tower
• The Last Resort
• The Dalimar Legacy
• A Crime in Reflection

As well as three spin-offs:

• Millionheir (Nintendo DS)
• Agent X (Glu Mobile)
• The Malgrave Incident (Nintendo Wii)

They can be downloaded at the "Official Fan Site" (isn't that an oxymoron?) or the Big Fish Games site.

In 2013, Big Fish has also announced a free-to-play spinoff game, Spirits of Blackpool. The app release is for iOS in the Canadian App Store.

The Ravenhearst story arc subseries is arguably the most famous line of titles to come from the Big Fish developers. Although not all of the plots in the arc are directly related to the events at Ravenhearst Manor, you play the same Master Detective in all of them and there is a tangential connection in each one.

• In the original Ravenhearst, you are requested by the Queen of England to investigate the history of Ravenhearst Manor, situated in Blackpool. You must assemble the pages of a young woman's lost diary to find out about the terrible things which happened there.
• In Madame Fate, the title character summons you to her carnival because she has had a vision of her own death, and she wants you to figure out who her murderer will be and stop them.
• In Return to Ravenhearst, you return to the ruined manor when you realize that although you solved the mystery connected to Emma's diary, the house was the site of several other grisly events that need to be brought to light.
• In Dire Grove, you leave the Ravenhearst incidents behind you and travel to a community built on top of an ancient Celtic settlement, where four graduate students have gone missing in an unseasonal blizzard.
• In 13th Skull, you're asked to leave England and travel back to the United States to aid a woman whose husband is missing, and whose young daughter insists he was abducted by a ghost.
• In Escape From Ravenhearst, you must return to the remains of the manor one more time, to find out why people have been disappearing in the area.
• In Shadow Lake, you investigate the haunted ruins of a small New England town that was destroyed by an earthquake, aided by a psychic and her spirit-guided drawings.
• In Fate's Carnival, you return to Fate's Carnival and put a stop on its curse once and for all.
• In Dire Grove, Sacred Grove, you return to Dire Grove after receiving a request from the town to help solve the problem of wild animals attacks and unusually severe coldness plaguing the town.
• In Key to Ravenhearst, an unusual series of shipwrecks bring you back to the area around Ravenhearst Manor, which has been rebuilt as a museum.
• In Ravenhearst Unlocked, you wake up to find yourself trapped in the same mental asylum as the Dalimars, and your goal now is to escape and stop Alister from completing his plans for immortality.
• In Broken Hour, a photographer and good friend of the Queen has gone missing, and the Master Detective must investigate his last known location: a creepy Victorian clock tower turned hotel known as Huxley's Boarding House that is rife with clockwork mechanisms and tragic secrets.
• In The Black Veil, you reunite with Alison (one of the students from the Dire Grove incident), now a reporter, as you both try to uncover the cause of a rapid aging plague that's sweeping through the abandoned town of Dreadmond, Scotland and figure out how it could be connected to The Battle of the Somme and a golden feather.
• In Rewind, your investigation at the mysterious Hotel Victory becomes a quest to mend your own history, finding people - allies, villains, and others - from many of your past adventures and returning them to their proper eras.
• In The Dalimar Legacy, you find yourself trapped in the past in the body of long time enemy Charles Dalimar.

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These games provide examples of:

#-M

• 555: The tavern in 13th Skull has a list of its employees' phone numbers in its office, and all of them start with "555-".
• Abandoned Hospital:
  • The sinister hospital in Prime Suspects goes by that appellation
  • Not exactly, but the Blackpool Temperance Hospital and the asylum - or at least, Charles's re-creations of them - in Escape From Ravenhearst have many of the aspects of this trope.
• Abbey Road Crossing: In The Black Veil one of several fake CD covers, labeled "The Alisters", depicts four men in black robes making the crossing.
• Abhorrent Admirer: In Rewind, Lucy the Bearded Lady has taken a liking to Victor Dalimar (of all people), and this does not please him at all.
• Accidental Marriage: Solving one of the puzzle sets in Escape From Ravenhearst is interpreted by Charles as accepting his proposal of marriage. The Master Detective's reaction is "Oh, GOD no!"
• Achievement System: Most Collector's Editions have one.
• Adventure Game: Return to Ravenhearst changes the format to this, though there are still areas for item hunting.
• Amusement Park of Doom/Circus of Fear: The setting of Madame Fate and Fate's Carnival.
• Anachronism Stew: In Ravenhearst, several of the puzzles that keep certain rooms sealed contain technology—including televisions, access card systems, and an electric guitar—that wasn't developed until long after 1895, when Charles built the place. It's unclear whether or not Charles just kept adding to the doors after he murdered Emma or, given that Time Travel is introduced in later games, was jumping ahead to the future to secure objects that he needed.
• Ancient Artifact: The Ball of Fate.
• Ancient Order of Protectors: The Countess reveals there was a knight order which only purpose was to guard the mirror in which the Shade was trapped and prevent this terrifying entity from being released at any cost. Unfortunately, this order disappeared at some point in history, leading Lady Gloria Codington to find the mirror and become corrupted by the Shade.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • Emma's diary in Ravenhearst, and the videotapes found scattered in Dire Grove.
  • Averted and lampshaded in Return to Ravenhearst, where one of the rules Charles posted that Rose had to obey forbade her from keeping a diary of any sort.
  • Cassandra's visions in Shadow Lake are a form of this, narrating the story of how the town became the ruined and haunted site of the game.
  • Fate's Carnival reveals that the log you find in the carnival belongs to Charles Dalimar's father, Alister.
  • The bonus chapter of Sacred Grove justifies Alister's logs due to him having poor memory to begin with and never trusting it for his plans.
• Apothecary Alligator: In Ravenhearst Unlocked, the apothecary shop has what appears to be a stuffed dimetrodon hanging from the ceiling.
• Arch-Enemy: After the events of Escape, Fate's Carnival, and Sacred Grove, the main battle is clearly the Master Detective vs. Alister Dalimar.
• Art Evolution: The games get progressively more detailed to the point that Big Fish hired Elephant Games, who were already known for their extremely detailed hidden object games, to design Fate's Carnival. The games take another shift in Key to Ravenhearst as Eipix Entertainment has been hired to develop it.
• Ascended Extra: Benedict Caldwell, the man possessed by the twins during Key to Ravenhearst, is the main character of the game's bonus mode, which depicts the prelude to the main game's plot.
• Asshole Victim: Madame Fate is a mean-spirited, abusive Jerkass to her entire staff, gloating with glee as her crystal ball reveals the horrid ways they're all going to suffer—and in many cases die—at midnight. The player probably won't be shedding many tears when Charles Dalimar kills her at the end of the game.
• Ax-Crazy: Meredith Huxley, from Broken Hour, has, as her father put it, lost her humanity after the death of her children and the operation that granted her immortality. It turned her completely deranged and murderous, having killed countless people over the years.
• Back from the Dead:
  • At the end of Escape From Ravenhearst, the efforts of the Master Detective have restored the murdered Emma, Rose, Gwendolyn, and Charlotte to life. Charles had apparently already restored himself to full life, but dies again in the final explosion.
  • Madame Fate herself, but only temporarily in order to task Isis to accompany The Master Detective on her journey to break the carnival's curse. The carnies themselves have been brought back from the dead to suffer another punishment before The Master Detective frees them.
• Balloonacy: In Madame Fate, one of the background animations in the Kitty Carnival is a little cat flying while holding three balloons.
• The Bartender: There's one in 13th Skull at the local dive bar, a young woman who is easily the friendliest person you meet in the course of the game (if not the entire series).
• Bat Scare: Leaning over the well in Escape will trigger one of these.
• Beat Still, My Heart: The final puzzle in Return to Ravenhearst features a beating heart (implied to be Charles Dalimar's) in a Soul Jar. You can even make it beat faster by injecting epinephrine into it.
• Bedlam House: Charles was locked up in one in the backstory of the Ravenhearst saga. He recreated the asylum in Escape From Ravenhearst. Another one, the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum, is the primary setting of Ravenhearst Unlocked, as the Master Detective wakes up to realize that she's imprisoned there.
• Berserk Button: The curator of the Dire Grove museum apparently hates anyone who does not show respect to the town's history, so they crafted a lock with the town's founding date as the code, meaning anyone who doesn't know about the town cannot get into the museum. (At least, they can't get in when the museum isn't open...)
• Big Fancy House/Haunted Castle:
  • The setting of Ravenhearst, which, while certainly haunted, is more of a mansion than a castle.
  • Part of the setting of Dire Grove may qualify. It's actually a bed and breakfast, but it's a centuries-old structure that may well have been a castle or manor at one time.
  • Also, the southern mansion in 13th Skull.
  • The haunted prison in Shadow Lake literally looks like a ruined castle.
  • The hidden areas accessible in the bonus content epilogue to Fate's Carnival resemble a medieval fortress.
• Bilingual Bonus: Apparently the Master Detective can't read Latin, as a plaque at the beginning of Escape more or less trumpets the fact that she's walking into a trap.
• Black Cloak: Fittingly enough for an old and very evil sorcerer, Alister Dalimar sports one of these in every game he appears in.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The Shade, the main antagonist in The Countess, appears as a creepy, black-clad version of Lady Gloria Codington with black eyes with eerie white irises.
• Bully Brutality: In Shadow Lake, the resident bully inadvertently pushes one of her schoolmates off their school's bell tower while trying to steal an ancient relic from him.
• Call-Back: The menu screen for Dire Grove is the dashboard of The Master Detective's car, which features a bobblehead doll of Madame Fate. The bobblehead is still there in Escape and in Key.
  • Speaking of Madame Fate, Shadow Lake has a pachinko game with Madame Fate's portrait and the leitmotif from her game; it also spouts out quotes that she would speak.
  • Fate's Carnival is one big Call-Back to Madame Fate and the Ravenhearst arc.
  • Sacred Grove has The Master Detective reminisce on occasion about the case in Dire Grove. The bonus chapter also requires you to destroy an effigy of Alister Dalimar's heart as its final task, which is a Call-Back to Return to Ravenhearst in which you collect jeweled hearts to access and destroy Charles Dalimar's mechanically-sustained real heart.
  • The Black Veil marks the reunion between the Master Detective and Alison Sterling, the student she had saved back in Dire Grove.
• Captain Ersatz: Several of the games obviously try to put a back-story on several Disney Theme Parks rides, including one which already has a back-story. The house called Ravenhearst is inspired by Phantom Manor (a.k.a. Ravenwood Manor) and The Haunted Mansion; 13th Skull is inspired by The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Cats Are Magic: Isis is a black cat who accompanies The Master Detective through her quest through Fate's Carnival. Justified as she's Madame Fate's cat, brought back as a ghost.
• Ceiling Corpse: Near the end of Dire Grove, Alison Sterling is found encased in solid ice on the farmhouse ceiling. She gets better.
• Celtic Mythology: Features prominently in Dire Grove and its sequel.
• Cheesy Moon: In Millionheir, the secret of astronomer Lee O. Ryan is that he is addicted to the green cheese from which the moon is made and that he sold Phil's private book collection to be able to get the cheese back to Earth.
• Chekhov's Gag: In 13th Skull - the 7th game from the series - if you click several times on the mirror in the Lawson's bathroom, the Master Detective playfully starts to to summon Bloody Mary before changing their mind, saying they'd rather save this mystery for another time. It remained a mere throwaway joke for 13 years and 19 games... until A Crime in Reflection came along, in which the Master Detective is confronted to Bloody Mary for real.
• Child by Rape: Possibly. A reference in Return to Ravenhearst has been interpreted by many fans (and The Other Wiki) as evidence that Charles forced himself on Emma's nursemaid Rose, resulting in his equally deranged son Victor.
  • In Key to Ravenhearst, we learn that Charles and Rose had three children — the twin girls of Return are his biological children. Since Rose was married to her husband when she first appears, and he acknowledged the girls as his, it's not clear just how this happened. It might have been rape-by-deception (with Charles impersonating her husband); it might have been plain rape and Rose being unwilling to tell her husband she was raped; or it might have been a consensual extramarital affair.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Out of all the carnies to return in Fate's Carnival, the only ones not to return are Lucy the Bearded Lady, Twyla Tangle the Contortionist, and Armando the Ringleader.
  • Lucy does make an appearance in Rewind.
• Church of Saint Genericus: Shadow Lake gives us the Bitterford Community Church. In the US, a name like that implies Generic Protestant, and the building is a typical New England church; white-painted wood, clear glass in the windows instead of stained glass. It also has two icon-style paintings at the front of the sanctuary, and the hidden-object scene set there has you looking for bottles of holy water. The psychic vision linked to that area show the pastor (normally a Protestant title) in Roman Catholic vestments and collar.
• City in a Bottle: In an in-Verse example, in Return to Ravenhearst: there's a map on the wall of Gwendolyn and Charlotte's home-schooling classroom that depicts nothing but an outline of England and Wales, with "Unknown" scrawled on the vague, fading-out edges of Scotland, Ireland, and the French coast. The only settlement on the map is Blackpool, nearest town to the Ravenhearst estate. This is probably to convice the poor girls that there was nothing outside their underground prison.
• Classical Elements Ensemble: The Banshee from Dire Grove is the vengeful spirit of a young woman, who was sacrificed in ancient times by a farmer (earth), a fisherman (water), a blacksmith (fire), and a hunter (presumably of birds and/or via archery, hence air).
• Cliffhanger: Madame Fate ends with a murderous spirit on the loose wanting revenge on you due to the events of Ravenhearst and the words "To Be Continued."
  • The ending of Key to Ravenhearst leaves a few things hanging, including whether the Master Detective survives, although Ravenhearst Unlocked's release spoils the fact that she does.
• Clock Tower: Broken Hour's main location is Huxley Boarding House, a converted clock tower turned hotel.
• Clockworks Area: The final chapter in Broken Hour takes place in Huxley's Boarding House's clock tower, which very strongly invokes this trope.
• Closed Circle: The town of Dire Grove becomes a form of this every winter, according to the brochures The Master Detective reads in that game. Because it's a remote settlement that experiences very harsh conditions, the residents shut everything down in the late fall and stay elsewhere until spring.
• Clueless Mystery: Madame Fate, from the game of the same name, thinks one of her 15 employees will kill her at midnight. It turns out that none of them are the real killer — heck, almost all of them are dead when midnight comes — and the one who does off Fate turns out to be a character from an earlier game who was never mentioned at all in this one!
• Complexity Addiction: It's revealed that Charles Dalimar suffered a genuinely psychotic obsession with overly complicated locking systems; it first manifested as a child (prompting his mother to institutionalize him) and kept up throughout his entire adult life. This explains why nearly half the doors in his mansion are affixed with Rube Goldberg Machine locks—simple keys weren't enough for him.
• Condensation Clue:
  • The solution to opening the padlock of Charles caged trailer in Escape from Ravenhearst is revealed to be written on a bathroom window after the Master Detective turns on the hot water, producing steam.
  • A possession-victim from Shadow Lake scrawls a clue in the fog of a car window, then dies and erases the clue as his hand slides down the glass. Fortunately, you can review the cinematic as many times as necessary to jot down what it says.
• Content Warnings:
  • Escape From Ravenhearst has a bold, underlined red warning on its download page to advise players that it is a "deep psychological thriller" that "may reveal deep-seated fears." This marked the first time that Big Fish had ever released a game for which they felt the need to make such a warning; since then they have released other games with similar warnings, but the majority of Big Fish Games are much more lighthearted fare, making these instances very noteworthy.
  • Ravenhearst Unlocked comes with a fat bold warning that it's "an intense psychological thriller intended for mature audiences."
• Continuity Nod: This series adores this trope. Almost all of its games contain at least one, usually many.
  • Abe Stinkin, a suspect from Prime Suspects, is seen on a newspaper in The Malgrave Incident.
  • Vincent Gavone, another character from Prime Suspects, is said to be a member of a crime syndicate called S.T.A.I.N.. It is the organization the Master Detective disbanded in Huntsville.
  • Art the Carny, from Madame Fate, is heavily implied to be Arthur Lugen, a character from Prime Suspects.
  • The sequels in the Ravenhearst arc will usually provide some sort of nod to the fact that they are part of the same arc, even if they focus on a totally different story. For instance, the events of Dire Grove have nothing to do with the events at the Ravenhearst estate, but the in-game diary opens with a mention of the events of Return to Ravenhearst. Similarly, the diary in 13th Skull references Dire Grove.
  • It is eventually revealed that all of the games in the Ravenhearst arc are in fact connected to that plot, even the ones that don't appear to have anything to do with it.
    • The collector's edition of Dire Grove shows that Victor Dalimar is hiding out in the basement of the grocery store in Dire Grove, plotting revenge against the Master Detective.
    • Escape From Ravenhearst reveals that Charles Dalimar's mother, Abigail, was the daughter of Grace O'Malley and Phineas Crown, the Ghost Pirate from 13th Skull - and that Charles used to be part of the Fate Carnival!
    • The collector's edition of Shadow Lake reveals that the Master Detective is headed back to Fate's Carnival.
    • Fate's Carnival reveals that Charles' father Alister has a deep-seated grudge against Madame Fate, and cursed her carnival after failing to obtain her Ball of Fate for his own purposes. The full extent of his obsession with the Ball is further explained in Ravenhearst Unlocked, where it is revealed to be an Ancient Artifact.
    • It's revealed in the bonus chapter of Sacred Grove that Alister Dalimar was a Mistwalker who was banished from the clan for desecrating one of their sacred rituals into a blood ritual. He's also the one who manipulated the events that led to the feud between the Crowford family and the Mistwalkers in his quest for power and immortality. In fact, Lily Crowford was his daughter.
  • Madame Fate is the queen of continuity nods, even more so than the Ravenhearst-related things. Aside from The Malgrave Incident, there is not a single game released after her debut game that doesn't mention the titular fortune teller:
    • At the end of Millionheir, Phil T. Rich decides to convert his gigantic mansion into an amusement park. The news clipping shown right after the scene shows that said amusement park was Fate's Carnival, and one of the headlines says that "Madame Fate found a home". Although, future entries of the series contradict this, as they show that Fate's Carnival is far older than that.. Also, there is a booth in the gaming room than features some sort of fortune telling machine with a "Madame Fate" panel on it.
    • Return to Ravenhearst, being a direct sequel to Madame Fate, features a photograph of her on the first entry of the case file with the mention "deceased" under it.
    • Also, the bobblehead doll that is featured in Dire Grove, Escape from Ravenhearst and Key to Ravenhearst.
    • In 13th Skull, the Master Detective references her in the case file when he meets Momma Aimee.
    • In Shadow Lake, she appears on a Pachinko game in the pharmacy (who knows what such a device does there in the first place).
    • She also appears in person in Fate's Carnival, obviously enough.
    • A sticker with the logo of her namesake game is featured on the Master Detective's suitcase (along other stickers referring to all the previous mainstream Mystery Case Files games bar Shadow Lake) in Dire Grove, Sacred Grove.
    • She is once again mentioned on a poster and Alister Dalimar's notes in Ravenhearst Unlocked.
    • A sticker of her head is found on the Captain's wallet found in Broken Hour, and her hands appear on one of the latest puzzles of the game.
    • Finally, she appears in The Black Veil during the Master Detective's Near-Death Experience.
  • Fate's Carnival and its carnies are often referenced, too:
    • Puddles the clown appears on a magazine in the Landry's home in 13th Skull.
    • Lance, the sword swallower, appears on a memorabilia found in the lighthouse in Key to Ravenhearst.
    • Also in Key to Raveanhearst, the ship captain's diary shows that he went on a trip to Fate's Carnival and he praises Bianca, the daredevil diva, for her performance.
    • Larry, Tabitha and Fabiano are all featured on a poster in Alister's secret room in the Bedlam House.
    • In The Black Veil, there is an adhesive featuring Twyla Tangle, the contortionist.
    • And of course, they almost all appeared in Fate's Carnival, the sole exception being Twyla Tangle. (Lucy and Armando, while not seen in the main game, are featured on an achievement fan and a collectible card, respectively.)
  • In both Dire Grove and 13th Skull, the letters CD+ER are carved somewhere. These are the initials of Charles Dalimar and Emma Ravenhearst.
  • In Fate's Carnival, there is a ornament in the shape of a skull with a "13" on it dangling from the Master Detective's car's rear-view mirror.
  • The deceased captain from Key to Ravenhearst had visited Fate's Carnival before his death. Also, his wallet is found in Broken Hour, where he is shown to have stayed at Huxley's Boarding House at some point. The is even lampshaded by the Master Detective.
  "Hey - I know him! The good captain surely had a thing for visiting strange places."
  • Benjamin Wright, the wraith hunter in Broken Hour aims at joining the Ghost Patrol crew that was first seen in Shadow Lake.
  • Also in Broken Hour, one of the final puzzles feature a picture of each Madame Fate's hands, Gwendolyn and Charlotte in their Ravenhearst Unlocked appearance, and the 13th skull from, well, 13th Skull. How these pictures ended up in the Victorian era Huxley's Boarding House is a mystery.
  • The case file in both Broken Hour and The Black Veil feature little decorations alluding to Madame Fate, the Ravenhearst arc and 13th Skull.
  • Alison Sterling, a student from Dire Grove, reappears as a journalist in The Black Veil.
  • Moths to a Flame is full of continuity nods. The game's Big Bad is obsessed with the Master Detective and has re-created scenes from some of her earlier cases.
• Cosmic Retcon: The Dalimar Legacy basically undoes the entire Ravenhearst arc by having the Master Detective sent back in time to prevent Charls Dalimar from kidnapping Emma Ravenhearst and construction Ravenhearst Manor. While it doesn't erase Alister Dalimar from existence, it does change a LOT of important plot points from the series like the death of Madame Fate, the birth of Charles' children, etc.
• Counterfeit Cash: The second case in Huntsville is about the dissemination in the titular town of bogus moolah.
• Creative Closing Credits: In the credits of Escape from Ravenhearst, names and headers constantly shift from the real ones to jokes. It makes sense, as the Master Detective has to search for objects that shift between two forms during most of the game.
• Creepy Cemetery: A lot of Mystery Case Files games feature a sinister graveyard:
  • The Huntsville cemetery is an ominous and misty place with spider webs, ghosts, bones and skeletons scattered around the place. It also features a mausoleum, which is just as macabre.
  • Not much is seen of the Dire Grove graveyard, but when you enter it, the ghostly hand of the Banshee might come out of the mausoleum and try to grab at something.
  • 13th Skull too has a creepy graveyard where Phineas Crown's mausoleum is. It is old and seemingly abandoned, and is most mausoleums and graves are covered with cobwebs and overgrown vegetation. Lewis feels very uneasy about this place, despite not believing in ghosts.
  • The Ravenhearst (the town, not the manor) graveyard is rather ominous and the entrance to some torture chambers is hidden within its grounds.
• Creepy Crows: The Ravenhearst estate has flocks of ravens around the area and Alister created a raven named Tanatos as a loyal servant. Really, at any point you see a raven in the games, you should already know that the Dalimars have something to do with it.
  • In Sacred Grove, where all of the Mistwalkers wear unique animal-themed costumes, the villain who's actually Alister himself wears raven-themed garments.
• Creepy Circus Music: The entire soundtrack from Madame Fate.
• Creepy Doll: Return to Ravenhearst has an entire display of old and damaged ones. Most of them even blink. Creepy indeed.
• Creepy Twins: In Return to Ravenhearst, but they become more psychotic and sadistic in Key to Ravenhearst. Charlotte, in particular, traps the Master Detective in the same mental asylum cell that once housed Alister and she plots to torture The Master Detective.
• Crusading Widow: Samuel Crowford blames Bjorn and the Mistwalkers for the death of his wife and the disappearance of his son, so he tries to rally the townsfolk against them. Most of the town actually don't want to fight and flee instead. The two hunters who stay behind with Samuel are there to ensure he doesn't get into deeper trouble.
• Daddy's Girl: Magnolia comes across like this in 13th Skull. The end reveals that she's actually Daddy's Little Villain, as she was in on her family's scheme and was plotting your demise the whole time.
• Dark Is Evil: Alister Dalimar, no denying that.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Dear lord, Charles's life was ten types of crazy, it's no wonder he went insane. It almost makes you feel sorry for him when further information about his family is revealed, especially since his father being a lunatic hell-bent on achieving immortality at all costs including killing his own descendants will do that to a guy.
• Darker and Edgier: Huntsville and Prime Suspects are lighthearted mysteries about silly crimes, with cartoonlike characters (many of whom have Punny Names) and goofy scenes. Then comes Ravenhearst, which features the story of a Haunted House, several genuinely disturbing puzzles and objects, and a plot that centers on a young man who felt so entitled to a woman who rejected his advances that he poisoned her, tried to drive her insane, and then brutally murdered her with an axe, trapping her spirit in the manor for over a hundred years. It's a massive tone shift that persists throughout the rest of the series.
• Dead Person Conversation: Or rather Dead Person Beration, as Alister has an artifact called the Black Lantern that allows him to talk to the shadows of the dead. He uses it to berate Charles and Victor for their failures.
• Death by Irony: The titular Madame Fate foresaw her death and called the Master Detective to help her. Turns out she would've been better off if she didn't call the Master Detective. See Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as to why.
• Death of a Child: Used on four occasions (though we only witness the death once).
  • Return To Ravenhearst, Charles kills Rose's two daughters and locks their souls into his unlife support machine. The girls are definitely pre-pubescent, and look to be younger than 10.
  • 13th Skull, after the final puzzle, there's a cutscene in which the ghost of Captain Crown drowns the criminals who have been playing the Master Detective for a sucker throughout the game ... including their pre-pubescent daughter Magnolia. Although, as Black Crown shows us, it turns out this trope is subverted as she survived, becoming akin to a vessel of Phineas Crown and she helped him in his plans to get back to the high seas.
  • In Shadow Lake, Cassandra's visions show Billy falling from the school's bell tower to his death. The (unbloodied) body is actually shown striking the ground.
  • In Broken Hour, it is implied that Fiona and Duncan Huxley might have died a brutal death, driving their mother to complete depression. Although the circumstances are unclear: they could either have died by the hands of their father, have been hidden away by him or have died because of an accident.
• Deep South: The setting for 13th Skull - Louisiana, specifically.
  • Huntsville's story sets it in Alabama.
• Dem Bones: The skeleton of the prisoner in Shadow Lake seems to come alive and then collapses into a pile.
  • After The Master Detective returns the skulls of Captain Crown's crew in 13th Skull, they all come alive — and then gang up on the Captain.
• Demonic Possession: In Dire Grove, the Banshee possesses four graduate students to force them to take on roles in the ritual that will release her from her prison. It's reversed once the Master Detective banishes the Banshee once more.
• Destination Defenestration: Meredith Huxley dies after getting blasted through a glass clock face and plummeting down the huge Clock Tower in Broken Hour.
• Destroy the Abusive Home: Charles did this to his childhood home after escaping the Bedlam House his gruesome mother sent him into. The Master Detective has to mimic that in the house's facsimile in Escape from Ravenhearst.
• Developer's Foresight: Try running tokens from the Collector's Edition of Escape through the X-ray machine, both before and after they've been energized.
• Dialogue Tree: In 13th Skull, when conversing with any of the other characters.
  • Also featured in Sacred Grove.
• Dig Your Own Grave: Literally in Escape From Ravenhearst, although the grave isn't quite what it appears.
• Dinner Deformation: A kinda gruesome example from Madame Fate, with the reveal of the sword swallower's fate: he inadvertently eats a real sword and the crystal ball shows him agonizing, the handles from the sword deforming his throat in a matter that can't possibly be survived.
• Disney Villain Death:
  • In Madame Fate, this is the prophetized death of the acrobat twins Mao and Amber Tan, who would fall to their death during a performance according the Madame Fate's Crystal Ball. They however reappear as antagonists in Fate's Carnival... only to be actually seen plummeting to their doom from a tower courtesy of a flock of ravens.
  • Lena Caldwell was murdered that way in Key to Ravenhearst when Gwendolyn pushed her from the top of the lighthouse.
  • At the end of Broken Hour, Meredith Huxley gets blown through the clock tower's glass dial and tumbles down to her demise.
• Disappears into Light: When attacked by his skeletal crew, Captain Phineas Crown's ghost disappears into a blindingly white light that takes over the whole screen.
  • Also, Madame Fate and Isis go up a moonbeam before dissipating into it at the end of Fate's Carnival's bonus gameplay.
• The Disembodied: Both the ending and the bonus chapter of Incident at Pendle Tower reveal that both Millicent and Bobby, who were thought to be bonafide ghosts for the whole game, are actually this: Dr. Corman's experiment didn't kill them per se, but turned them into spirits. And, as shown by the endgame, this is reversible, as both regain their physical bodies when the experiment itself if reversed by the Master Detective
• Dreadful Musician: Matilda Fitzgerald, one of the suspects from Prime Suspects, is said to be an atrociously bad singer. Her alias even is "Tone-deaf Tilly".
• Dr. Psych Patient: In the bonus game of Key to Ravenhearst, Benedict Caldwell arrives in a mental asylum, but the staff seems quite... off. Quite understandable since the doctors he meets are the lunatics He later discovers the actual staff Bound and Gagged.
• Druids: The Mistwalkers are druids that serve the forest around Dire Grove. They were mistakenly believed by the townsfolk to be the cause of the winter and it was actually the Mistwalkers who summoned The Master Detective. They also save the hunters from a wolf and bear attack.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: You may be the Master Detective, but almost nobody in 13th Skull is willing to give you any information (or the time of day) until you complete some sort of annoying Fetch Quest for them. The only exception is the librarian in the bar, who becomes very helpful once you beat him in checkers.
• Element No. 5: Items representing the five elements are needed to defeat the Big Bad in Dire Grove. According to the context of the game, the fifth element is represented by mercury.
• Entitled to Have You: Charles Dalimar certainly felt this way about Emma Ravenhearst. After courting her for a few months, he proposed marriage, and she politely declined—but he wasn't going to let a little thing like what she wanted stop him from getting his way...
• Equivalent Exchange: This is one of the Mistwalkers' most sacred rules of their creed. A young Peter Crowford offered himself to the Mistwalkers in exchange for saving his brother Derek's life. As an adult Derek planned to abuse this rule, kidnap their sacred fawn and force them to return Peter. The bonus chapter reveals that Alister Dalimar manipulated the entire incident.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Everybody — except you, of course — is dead and/or "doomed" in some way at midnight in Madame Fate, including Madame Fate herself!
• Everyone Calls Her The Master Detective
• Everyone Is a Suspect: Every single carny in Madame Fate has a strong motive to kill the titular fortune teller. In the end, none of them did: the murderer is a character that wasn't even mentioned in the game before!!
• Evil Doppelgänger: The Shade from The Countess is a variation of this trope: it started as a malevolent Mirror Monster with its own appearance, but it gradually took the shape of Lady Gloria Codington when feeding on her creativity over the years. It now appears as a black and very creepy doppelgänger of the benevolent Lady Codington.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The mere awakening of the Banshee in Dire Grove is enough to freeze the titular village and its surroundings. Should she be freed from her mystical tomb, she would freeze the entire world.
• Evil Poacher: A downplayed case. Ted, one of the two hunters that accompany Samuel, admits he was a poacher for extra money, but after an encounter with a Mistwalker or possibly Alister, he was so spooked he gave up poaching. He asks The Master Detective to not tell Samuel about it.
• Evil Wears Black:
  • Alister Dalimar is never seen without his Black Cloak. His son is also always wearing black clothing in his appearances.
  • In The Countess, the Shade gradually took the appearance of Lady Gloria Codington while feeding on her creativity, and now appears as a very creepy doppelgänger of hers wearing pitch-black dresses.
• Evil Sorcerer: Alister Dalimar. He's blatantly called a "dark sorcerer" in a magical news flyer. He had also been teaching Charles, but when Charles met Emma, he drops his lessons.
• Excuse Plot: The plots in all the games are basically excuses to look for random objects in cluttered scenes.
• Eye Scream: One of the lock-puzzles in Escape From Ravenhearst requires you to click a series of realistic, moving eyes. Each time you do so, there's an audible yelp of pain, as if you've genuinely poked someone in the eye.
• Face–Heel Turn: The Tattooed Man, the acrobats, and Doctor Goodwell betrayed the carnival for Alister Dalimar.
  • The twins, Gwendolyn and Charlotte Somerset, also choose to join their grandfather in Key to Ravenhearst, despite being rescued and aiding the Master Detective previously.
• Feathered Fiend: Tanatos, Alister Dalimar's raven familiar, often impedes the Master Detective's investigations, most notoriously in Fate's Carnival.
• Featureless Protagonist: The player character, although as noted below, the character's gender is revealed after the events of Madame Fate.
  • A bobblehead of the Master Detective can be collected in Fate's Carnival, but her face and body are heavily cloaked by trenchcoat, hat and scarf.
  • Sacred Grove now presents the player with the option of choosing the Master Detective to be male or female. One puzzle in the game (which refers to the original Dire Grove) identifies a female puppet as the Master Detective, though.
    • The puppet is male if you choose to play as the male Detective actually. In other words, the puppet changes depending on which gender you chose in the beginning of the game in your options menu.
• Fictional Document: Emma's diary in Ravenhearst. Most if not all of the books in the library in Dire Grove.
• Fighting from the Inside: Implied with Allison in Dire Grove. Though the Banshee ends up successfully possessing her to perform the ritual that will undo the binding spell, the last video tape in the Apocalyptic Log—which details how to defeat the evil spirit—is found near the site of that ritual. Since the entrance to the site is only opened to the world after Allison has been possessed, she must have dropped it there while she was traveling to it, meaning that she was actively resisting the Banshee's influence.
• Firehouse Dalmatian: One Dalmatian is found in the Huntsville Firehouse in Huntsville.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Implied for the end of Escape From Ravenhearst. Emma, Rose and her daughters have been dead for more than a hundred years, and now they've been brought back to life. It's unclear, at that point, whether a future game will show how well they adapt to the 21st century.
  • Unfortunately, the twins make a Heel–Face Turn when they choose to assist Alister in Key to Ravenhearst.
• Foreshadowing: The last line Madame Fate states before the game begins? "Find the soul that seeks to kill Madame Fate." The killer ends up being Charles Dalimar... who's already dead at the point in the story.
• Fortune Teller: The titular Madame Fate.
• Fountain of Youth: The entire plot of The Malgrave Incident revolves around this. Winston Malgrave asks the Master Detective to gather some rejuvenating dust around Malgrave Island to cure his wife Sarah's deadly illness. As it turns out, though, Sarah has been dead for a long time and the elderly Malgrave only wanted to gather the dust in order to become a young man again.
• Four Is Death: Four graduate students get themselves trapped in Dire Grove. All four are stuck in frozen stasis and brainwashed into performing an ancient ritual to free the banshee.
• Full Motion Video: Escape From Ravenhearst, Return to Ravenhearst, The 13th Skull, and Shadow Lake are the only games in the series that use live actors in the game settings. Dire Grove also use live actors, but any of the clips featuring the actors are simply videotapes that the Master Detective picks up as part of the story.
• Ghost Pirate: Suspected to be behind the disappearance in 13th Skull. He's got a Ghost Ship too.
• Ghost Town: Bitterford, Maine (the setting of Shadow Lake).
• Girls with Moustaches: Lucy the Bearded Beauty from Madame Fate, obviously enough
• Go into the Light: In The Black Veil, the Master Detective is stabbed by Richard Galloway and experiences a Near-Death Experience during which he has to go through the memories of her past cases. Each time she goes forward, the cursors indicate "Go toward the light".
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Dr. Corman's experiment in Incident at Pendle Tower... didn't go as planned, to say the least. What was intended to enhance Millicent Keaton's psychic powers instead fully turned her into a spirit and opened a rift to the spirit dimension, to both Millicent's and Dr. Corman's horror.
• Gratuitous Latin: A sign outside the reconstructed Ravenhearst gates in Key to Ravenhearst says "Ex cineribus resurgam" (Rise out of the ashes) at the bottom.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: The quitting screen in Fate's Carnival reads "Are you sure you want to leave? Madame Fate will be disappointed."
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The Amazing Larry is found in this condition in Fate's Carnival.
• Harmless Freezing: In Dire Grove, the four graduate students are frozen solid, but still alive and able to recite an ominous Madness Mantra once they're found. At the end of the game, they're also able to walk to the site of the Banshee's imprisonment and perform a ritual to free her. Justified since the freezing is magical in nature.
  • Averted in Broken Hour, where Harold is killed by Meredith by being encased in a block of solid ice.
• Haunted House:
  • Ravenhearst Manor, which is inhabited by the ghosts of Emma, Rose, her twin daughters and Charles Dalimar.
  • Subverted with Huxley's Boarding House in Broken Hour, as Meredith Huxley is very much alive...
• Hedge Maze: In Black Crown, the Crown Estate features a very large hedge maze, and the Master Detective has to use a dog's guidance to avoid getting lost within it.
• Hell Hotel: Hotel Victory in Rewind is the theater of some weird, disturbing things...
• Hidden Object Game
• Hilarious Outtakes: Return to Ravenhearst has this at the credits.
• Honor Before Reason: The original Master Detective, Ellen, decides to tie up and misdirect the current Master Detective in an attempt to keep him/her from interfering in "her" mission, so that she can personally stop Alister and atone for her previous mistake.
• Hope Sprouts Eternal: After the Master Detective finally destroys Ravenhearst Manor in Return to Ravenhearst, pink flowers bloom from bare tree branches while Emma, Rose, and the twins exit the burning mansion.
• Human Popsicle: When you find the four missing graduate students in Dire Grove, they've each been turned into one of these. Remarkably, they all survive.
• The Igor: Victor, in Return to and Escape From Ravenhearst, crosses this with Overlord Jr..
• Immortality Immorality: You would not believe all the horrors the Dalimar family achieved in their quest for eternal life. Or the ones Meredith Huxley and her father did to stay immortal.
• Immortality Inducer: Jacob Huxley's robotic hearts, which were implanted on both his wife and father-in-law.
• Immortality Seeker: There are many in this series:
  • Alister Dalimar. All of his crimes and the abuse he inflicts on his descendants is all because his lust for power and immortality.
  • Also, his son Charles Dalimar pursues the same goal, as shown prominently in Return to Ravenhearst; in that game, he has built a monstrous contraption that allows him to stay alive feeding on the souls of Emma Ravenhearst and Rose, Gwendolyn, and Charlotte Somerset.
  • Winston Malgrave from The Malgrave Incident also seeks this by the mean of a rejuvenating dust.
  • Jacob Huxley, from Broken Hour, was obsessed with finding a way to defeat death. He actually succeeded when he created a mechanical heart which he transplanted into both his wife Meredith (to save her from a certain death) and his father-in-law. Unfortunately, since Meredith became insane after the transplant, she, along with her father, killed him, as well as his assistant.
• Intercom Villainy: In Escape from Ravenhearst, Charles guides you through his nightmarish underground complex and narrates his own life through intercoms while he is spying on you.
• Iron Maiden: In Fate's Carnival, Lance Pierceman, the sword swallower, is found imprisoned in one. He is still alive, so the Master Detective must save him.
• It's Personal: Why Madame Fate was killed; because the Master Detective freed Emma from Ravenhearst Manor and also because Charles wanted vengeance for being labeled a freak while he was in her carnival.
  • Retconned in the bonus play of the Fate's Carnival CE: Madame Fate had imprisoned Charles's father Alister, so he killed her and imprisoned her soul.
• It Was with You All Along: In Fate's Carnival, you wanna know where that special black diary that was needed to stop Alister Dalimar was? Surprise, you've been holding it since the beginning of the game!
  • And also the means of destroying it: your Master Detective badge, which you've presumably been wearing since the series began.
• Jabba Table Manners:
  • Franco possesses them. He is renowned as the pie-eating champion.
  • Abigail Dalimar (or at least the mannequin representing her) can be seen lazing about in her bed upstairs, with discarded snacks and untouched leftovers all around her. And the way she gobbles down the dynamite pie is just not right.
• Jump Scare: In a series that often flirts with gruesome and disturbing, some of these are to be expected.
  • The creepy mannequin in the bathtub in Return to Ravenhearst delivers one heck of a fright.
  • Shadow Lake is littered with those.
  • Fate's Carnival has some too, but in lesser number.
• Karmic Death: All the workers of Madame Fate are dead/doomed in different ways:
  • The Amazing Larry (magician): A hack magician who ends up hacking himself in half.
  • Lucy the Bearded Lady: Famed for her glorious beard, which ends up getting chopped off.
  • Marlena the Mermaid: Married to Dante the Tattooed Man, she's currently in a Love Triangle with Fabiano, the Strong Man. She gets caught in a net for her troubles.
  • Art the Carny: Madame Fate has been reducing his cigarette smoking, and so he dies stuffing his mouth with cigarettes.
  • Twyla Tangle the Contortionist: Known for twisting her body and getting in and out of tight places, she gets trapped in a capsule underwater and can't escape.
  • Bianca the Daredevil Diva: Has tried to get a replacement daredevil due to getting migraines, when she performs, she gets blown up.
  • Fabiano the World's Strongest Man: Known for his incredible strength and then he is unable to lift a very heavy object and dies from suffocation.
  • Lance the Sword Swallower: Swallows fake swords as part of his act, then dies when he swallows a real one.
  • Armando the Ringmaster: Believes that he should be the one upstaging Madame Fate, and dies after someone poisoned his drink.
  • Tabitha the Lion Tamer: Wants revenge on Madame Fate who killed her favorite lion, and then she ends up under the jaws of her other lion.
  • Franco the Excessive: Madame Fate's son who is being pestered to find a wife and thus is making him lose appetite. He then becomes so hungry that he eats a horse.
  • Dr. Goodwell the Medicine Man: A snake-oil salesman who takes more of his fair share of funds from the carnival. He is then captured by his own snake and about to be devoured.
  • Puddles the Clown: A Sad Clown who believes that the circus is going cheap and wants it to be like the good old days. Gets killed when he accidentally shoots himself with a real gun instead of a Bang! flag gun.
  • Dante the Tattooed Man: Using his body to advertise different circuses, he dies by hanging himself by the only place without a tattoo—his tongue.
  • Mao and Amber Tan, the Acrobats: Brother and sister duo who are known to be pickpockets when not performing. When they do get to perform they fall to the ground without a net to save them.
  • Madame Fate: the fortune teller who finds out that she's dying and asks the Master Detective to help find her murderer...only to find out too late that she died because she brought the Master Detective to solve the case!
• Killed Off for Real: In Fate's Carnival, Franco, Art and Tabitha have been killed off, as all that's left of them are their bones.
  • The acrobats are implied to have plummeted to their doom after The Master Detective wakes up all the ravens in the tower.
  • Charles and Victor as well, since Alister was seen berating their ghosts with the Black Lantern and don't show up in Sacred Grove.
  • Ravenhearst Unlocked has Alister stab his granddaughter, Gwendolyn, to death.
• Klaatu Barada Nikto: This is the name of the bogus alien impersonated by Doris Blevins to terrorize locals in Huntsville.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Averted in Dire Grove — the Master Detective has to break into the inn's safe to retrieve a key, but scolds "herself" if the player clicks on the stack of money that's also there.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Rewind, being some sort of revisit of the entire series, manages to spoil the rather surprising ending of Huntsville (the identity of the Big Bad as a sweet old grandmother), the first game of the series, sixteen games and thirteen years later.
• Late to the Tragedy: The more the Master Detective explores the depths of Ravenhearst Manor, the more she learns about the horrifying events that took place there... back in 1895. And the more eager she becomes to free the victims and to punish the perpetrators.
  • Also, in Dire Grove, she gets in the eponymous village and slowly learns (via an Apocalyptic Log) what happened to a group of students just a little while earlier.
• Leaking Can of Evil: In Dire Grove, the Banshee is still safely imprisoned in her frozen tomb, but she's able to exert enough influence on the surrounding area to both cause an unnaturally cold winter and possess the graduate students who came to investigate; her main goal is to totally undo the seal binding her and destroy the world as revenge for being locked away in the first place.
• Lighthouse Point: Literally in Escape From Ravenhearst, where the lighthouse's beam points at the entrance to the underground prison Charles built for the Master Detective.
  • The same lighthouse reappears in Key to Ravenhearst and Ravenhearst Unlocked.
• Living Doll Collector: Charles Dalimar captured Rose Somerset and her daughters (which, as shown in Key to Ravenhearst, also are his own daughters) and trapped them in a nightmarish complex hidden beneath Ravenhearst Manor), where they seemingly had to play the role of his "family". Although it turns out they were mostly abducted as their souls were needed to fuel his Soul Jar.
• Living Photo: In Shadow Lake, a Jump Scare involves a woman on a photograph suddenly rising up and lunging toward the player, toppling the photo frame and revealing a clue hidden within.
• Lobotomy: Downplayed in Escape From Ravenhearst, where the Master Detective must perform a simulated lobotomy on an animatronic "mental patient" so she can beat him in a card game. Even then, said lobotomy consists solely of rotating a switch.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: Near the end of Ravenhearst, you have to search the entire manor for keys scattered throughout.
  • Same deal in Return, except this time it's jeweled hearts you need to collect.
  • In 13th Skull, you need to collect thirteen skulls. In a change, you can collect them earlier in the game and thereby not have to put up with the Big Bad yelling at you to hurry up.
• Locked Door: Several are found in Ravenhearst, though instead of traditional locks, there's a bunch of freaky, nonsensical puzzles in its place. The in-game diary makes the locks plot-relevant.
  • Lampshaded in Return to Ravenhearst, in which a document about Charles Dalimar being sent to an insane asylum comments on his "strange lock obsession".
  • In Escape from Ravenhearst it's explained that somehow Charles gained the ability to put locks on people's souls.
  • When she comes across yet another object-shaped lock in Sacred Grove, the detective is so clearly done with them. "Oh great. I'm going out of my skull with all these locks around here!" (Doubles as a Stealth Pun because the lock required a skull-shaped signet key.)
• Logo Joke: In the opening credits for 13th Skull, Felix the Fish (the Big Fish mascot, who always appears in their credits) shows up as a skeleton fish with "XIII" carved into his skull.
• The Lost Lenore: It's clear that Samuel loved his wife Lily dearly, and blames her death on the Mistwalkers as she was a former Mistwalker herself and Bjorn was in love with her.
• Love Makes You Crazy/Love Makes You Evil: Charles's Start of Darkness in Ravenhearst seems to have been caused by Emma rejecting his marriage proposal.
  • Subverted in Escape From Ravenhearst, where it's clear he was six kinds of Ax-Crazy before he even met her.
  • Alister blames all the trouble that befell Ravenhearst and the Dalimars on Charles falling for Emma, because if he hadn't, Charles would have continued his dark magic lessons with Alister.
• Lovecraft Country: Shadow Lake takes place in Maine.
• Madame Fortune: Most Fortune Tellers in the series are named "Madame x". This includes Madam Fleiss and more importantly Madame Fate.
• Madness Mantra: The ice-trapped students from Dire Grove. Taken to Department of Redundancy Department levels with Sarah, who recites "I am the Hunter" eleven times in a row.
• Magical Computer: In the first three games, your computer can quickly determine who caused a crime, where someone was during a crime, and even recreate long-lost diary entries! Well, after you find some random objects, of course...
  • In Dire Grove, this happens literally when supernatural forces cause your computer to spontaneously display the unlocking-code for a portal.
• The Man Behind the Man: When you first play the Ravenhearst arc, you're led to assume that Charles Dalimar is the Big Bad, given all the torment he's inflicted. As you continue playing, you realize that it's his father, Alister, who's been creating these events.
• The Marvelous Deer: The Forest Spirit from Dire Grove, Sacred Grove manifests as a blue-white stag with antlers made of ice. Its child has the form of a fawn with budding ice antlers.
• Matricide: Commited by Charles Dalimar. With a pie stuffed with dynamite, no less.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While Charles Dalimar himself is clearly supernatural, it's unclear in Escape From Ravenhearst whether he was actually communing with his father's ghost at the insane asylum, or just imagined it while listening to a raven croaking.
• Mirror Monster:
  • In The Countess, the Shade is a corrupting, evil entity that dwells in a creepy, pitch black mirror. Once guarded dutifully by an Ancient Order of Protectors, it was found centuries later by Lady Gloria Codington, on whose creativity the Shade was kept fed. It also trapped anyone coming close to it into its mirror dimension, where its hapless abductees were enslaved until death and even in their afterlife.
  • Bloody Mary from A Crime in Reflection also haunts a mirror dimension as a ghost, and just like the Shade she has the ability to drag hapless victims into it.
• Mirror Scare: In Shadow Lake, when the Master Detective opens the bathroom cabinet in the burnt home, you briefly see the reflection of the owner's horrifying ghost in the mirror.
  "I don't think I will be closing this cabinet any time soon."
• Misplaced Wildlife: Wolves and bears no longer live wild in Great Britain. Presumably the Mistwalkers from Sacred Grove acquired their animals elsewhere; the wolf from Dire Grove may have been a feral dog transformed by the same curse that froze the land.
• Monochrome Apparition: The ghosts of Emma Ravenhearst and the Somerset family are solid white, and so is the Banshee in Dire Grove. Also, Captain Crown's spirit is blue.
• Mouth Full of Smokes: This is how Art the Carny goes out in Madame Fate. Guess even a chain-smoker like him couldn't handle this many cigars at once.
  Madame Fate: "I always said those things would kill him".
• Multiple Endings: In Prime Suspects, the main culprit will change with each new game you play.
  • The same goes with both the heir and the traitor in Millionheir.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Key has a cut sequence in which the Detective finds Benedict working on the rebuilt manor's extended blueprints. The player views some rapid motion-sequences of gears, passages, and ghosts being funneled down them in Benedict's racing thoughts, accompanied by suspenseful music; the Master Detective just sees some dude scribbling at a desk with his back turned to her.
• Mustache Vandalism: In The Harbinger Marge's diary includes a picture of Aisling with devil horns and a mustache drawn on it.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Derek has this reaction after Forest Light, the leader of the Mistwalkers, reveals himself to actually be Peter, and persuades his brother to drop his gun.

N-Z

• Never Mess with Granny: In Huntsville, you have to put an end to a crime spree in a small rural town. The brains of the operations? The elderly town librarian (who is seen knitting in the crime syndicate's weapon-loaded headquarters!).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: You have to literally smash through the bathroom floor in Dire Grove in order to reach the locked office.
  • The Master Detective uses scissors to cut open a bag of garbage and several paintings in 13th Skull.
  • A non-literal example occurs in Escape From Ravenhearst, where your determination to keep poking around in the ruins gets Emma and the Somersets re-captured, at least for a while.
  • Because the Master Detective returned to the carnival, she inadvertently frees Alister Dalimar from the Ball of Fate and it's up to her to re-imprison him again.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Ever since he was graced by Ankou, the Goddess of Death, Richard Galloway has been completely obsessed with death, desperately longing to finally be at Ankou's side forever.
• No Animals Were Harmed: The ending screen from Madame Fate states that "No actual carnies were harmed in this production". Ironic, since they almost all perished.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: One of the twenty characters in Prime Suspects is a blonde debutante who carries around a chihuahua, films a reality show called The Simpleton, and is named Holly Day Inn after a famous hotel. Three guesses as to who she's supposed to be.
• Non-Human Sidekick:
  • In Fate's Carnival, The Master Detective is accompanied by a beautiful black cat named Isis. She's actually Madame Fate's cat and is there to provide help to The Master Detective. One of the bonus features is being able to purchase toys and accessories for her.
  • Alister himself has Tanatos, a black raven he created as a display of his power.
  • The bonus chapter of Sacred Grove has an unnamed little red squirrel tasked by Ulf the Mistwalker to help The Master Detective. He only does anything if she feeds him an acorn.
  • At the beginning of Moths to a Flame, the Master Detective gets a Robot Buddy. Called a M.A.C. (Mechanical Automated Companion), it's a sort of robot scarab beetle with a shell that matches the MCF badge, that can fly to retrieve items for her. It was built by The Archivist as part of his bait to trap the Master Detective. M.A.C. gets broken once she's trapped.
• Occult Detective: Ever since Ravenhearst, the Master Detective's investigations have pitted her against ghosts, curses, and dangerous mystical artifacts. Cassandra also declares her intention to become one in the aftermath of Shadow Lake.
• Offing the Offspring: Alister killed his daughter Lily with a curse and manipulated it so that Samuel and Derek would blame the Mistwalkers for her death, which plays into his plans for resurrection. And given that he's been around for centuries, who knows how many more descendants he may have killed to keep himself alive.
• Old, New, Borrowed and Blue: In Escape from Ravenhearst, each music box the Master Detective has to wind up to reveal the wedding gazebo has a plaque reading respectively "Something Old", "Something New", "Something Borrowed" and "Something Blue".
• Ominous Pipe Organ: At the end of Escape from Ravenhearst, Charles Dalimar himself plays a sinister version of the series' main theme on a pipe organ (which is powered by a machine sucking out life energy)). He also owned another, bigger pipe organ as seen in Ravenhearst and Fate's Carnival.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: At the end of Escape from Ravenhearst , Emma and the Somersets give you the code to shut down the central mechanism with their eye movements.
• Oop North: The three main games in the Ravenhearst arc takes place in a fictional version of Blackpool, as well as the upcoming Spirits of Blackpool spin-off game. The timeline and use of Celtic mythology in Dire Grove also places it somewhere in northern England.
• Open-Door Opening: Many games start out with the Master Detective unlocking a gateway, or approaching the door of a manor. Notable examples include the Ravenhearst gate in Return to Ravenhearst, Fate's Carnival's entrance in Fate's Carnival and the Lawson's mansion in 13th Skull.
• Our Banshees Are Louder: The main antagonist in Dire Grove is referred as "The Banshee". She doesn't have a scream attack, but when you can freeze an good chunk of England solid while still being mystically bound in a cavern, do you really need one?
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Marlena the Mermaid, one of Fate's Carnival's carnies. Although she isn't a real one as implied in Fate's Carnival.
  • In Millionheir, the aquarium tour guide Marina Fobic is an actual mermaid. The Master Detective reveals her true form by soaking her with a bucket.
• Out of the Inferno: At the end of Return to Ravenhearst, Emma, Rose, Gwendolyn and Charlotte walk out the burning remains of Ravenhearst Manor. Although, them being ghosts might have helped.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": When you find the missing keys for the crafted typewriter, the password you have to enter is always "victor".
• Patricide: In Broken Hour, Harold Wallace gets iced by his completely unhinged daugter Meredith because he did not follow the house rules, even if it arguably wasn't his fault. And we mean iced as literally as possible.
• Phony Psychic: Madam Fleiss in Prime Suspect is dubbed a "Fraudulent Medium" in the case files.
• Pirate Booty: The central plot point of 13th Skull.
• Pixel Hunt: Some of those items can be pretty teensy...
• Plot Tumor: The Ravenhearst story arc could be considered this. It could have been perfectly fine as a one-time game and yet 9 subsequent games were more or less linked to it. It also gained more insanity and complexity with every entry.
• Point-and-Click Map: Most of the games have one of these, though the full functionality of the trope doesn't kick in until the series goes to IHOG format in Return To Ravenhearst. (And in Black Veil, the map doesn't work until the Master Detective finds a replacement battery for it.)
• Polly Wants a Microphone: 13th Skull features Mr. Crickets, a talking parrot belonging to Charlotte Landry.
• Prematurely Marked Grave: In Escape From Ravenhearst, the Master Detective finds a tombstone with her title on it, and a date-of-death that matches the real life date on which the scene is played.
• Prophecy Twist: Escape establishes that Madame Fate was right that one of her carnival workers would murder her; she was only mistaken in thinking it was one of the current crew, rather than the "Freak Boy" from generations earlier.
• Psycho Electric Eel: Hidden within the depths of Huxley's Boarding House from Broken Hour is a laboratory with tanks hosting some electric "eels" (although they resemble lampreys far more than they resemble eels). Sebastian's body is found floating in one of these tanks, having been either electrocuted by said eels, or drowned.
• Pungeon Master: Believe it or not, Madame Fate. Each and every reaction she has when witnessing the (invariably gruesome) fates of her carnival workers contains at least on pun, sometimes even more.
• Punny Name:
  • In Huntsville, there is a lunatic whose name is... Luna H. Tick.
  • Many characters in Prime Suspects have one, including:
    • Constance Noring, a narcoleptic
    • Annie Buddyhome, a housewife and master thief
    • Crystal Ball, a fortune teller
    • Pierce Hart, a fake doctor...
  • Basically every character from Millionheir have one: Sherry Blossom the gardener, Phil T. Rich the filthy-rich millionaire, Justine Time the clockmaker, and so on.
• Rapid Aging: In The Black Veil, the town of Dreadmond falls to a mysterious illness that cause the townspeople to age from approximatively sixty years in a heartbeat. It turns out this is the deed of the town "benefactor", Richard Galloway, who worships the Goddess of Death.
• Really 700 Years Old: The Mistwalkers have the ability to request to have their lives extended by the Forest Spirit, so it's unknown how old the Mistwalkers whom the Master Detective meets really are. Averted with their leader, Forest Light. He's really an adult Peter Crowford, so he's at least in his mid-20s. As a (banished) Mistwalker, Alister Dalimar has probably been around at least the 1700s or earlier, as Dire Grove was founded in 1712 and Charles lived around the 1800s. It's unknown how old Lily really was when she met and married Samuel.
  • Unlocked establishes that Alister was actually born in 1547. Even the Mistwalkers probably had no idea how old he really was when he joined them, and Lily was probably only another in a long list of offspring he'd killed to postpone his death while seeking permanent immortality.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Tanatos, Alister's evil raven familiar, is recognizable at his red eyes resembling those of a snake. Encountering him usually mean that danger (i.e., the Dalimars) is lurking around.
• Red Herring:
  • While Incident at Pendle Tower has us think for the entire main game that Doctor Corman is an evil mad scientist that actively plotted to cause the sorry state of the tower and Millicent are in at the present time, the bonus chapter reveals that the plot was not driven by some malevolent scheme: it happened due to sheer bad luck: the doctor was genuinely trying to advence psychic science and was as horrified as Millicent when his experiment went wrong, even trying to stop it before it was too late and disappering in the process.
  • The basic premise of A Crime in Reflection (a victorian Mirror Monster - that looks a lot like Gloria Codington - abducting people into a mirror dimension) just screams "The Countess sequel" to many veteran Mystery Case Files players, and the game even acknowledges this numerous times. However, the Shade has no part in this plot, the villain being an entirely new character.
• Revenant Zombie: A revenge-driven one spreads terror in the town of Avondel in The Revenant's Hunt.
• Revenge: Alister blames Madame Fate and the Master Detective for destroying Ravenhearst. He somehow also blames Madame Fate for not stopping Charles from falling for Emma.
  • Samuel Crowford and Bjorn both blame each other for the death of Samuel's wife Lily (a former Mistwalker) and attack each other when the tension got too much. The entire reason the curse of the Forest was brought down on Dire Grove was that Samuel's son Derek kidnapped the Mistwalkers' sacred fawn in revenge for Lily's death and Peter's disappearance.
• Revenge of the Sequel: Return to Ravenhearst. And then Escape from Ravenhearst. And then Key to Ravenhearst. And then Ravenhearst Unlocked.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The secret of Auda Maton, the waitress from Millionheir, is that she is a robot (her name gives that away from the very start, though).
• Room Full of Crazy: The convict's cell and train tunnel in Shadow Lake. Bonus points for the scrawls on the wall being in an obscure Native American script.
• Rube Goldberg Device: The Other Wiki compares the door puzzles in Ravenhearst to these. The complex puzzles in the other games may also qualify, as well.
• Rust-Removing Oil: Used liberally in the series: when an object is rusted, expect to restore its usefulness with some oil.
• Samus Is a Girl: The Master Detective you play as is revealed to be female at the end of Madame Fate. It makes the Accidental Marriage scene in Escape from Ravenhearst very unsettling.
  • Inverted as of Fate's Carnival. You can collect bobbleheads of most of the characters from Ravenhearst, Dire Grove, 13th Skull, and Fate's Carnival, including the Master Detective. The bobblehead's appearance and laugh are definitively masculine, but as of Sacred Grove, you can play the detective as male or female.
  • Switched back as of Key to Ravenhearst — hardly surprising, since female protagonists are something of a house style for Eipix.
  • The Archivist from Moths to Flame refers to the Master Detective as "he". Either he's even crazier than his actions in the game suggest, or the M.D.'s gender has flipped again.
• Savage Wolves: The plot of Sacred Grove is that supernatural wolves, as well as the ice, have been plaguing Dire Grove and a desperate group of hunters have asked The Master Detective for her help. In Dire Grove, you must bribe a wolf with a microwave-thawed steak to get past it.
• Scary Scarecrows: There is an eerie scarecrow with a pulsating red light inside its eye socket at the entrance of Fate's Carnival. When the detective gives it a heart, it hisses at them and opens its mouth to reveal a mutoscope reel. The scarecrow is later burned when it is hit by lightning.
• Scenery Gorn: Starting with the Ravenhearst arc, the abandoned settings of each game look increasingly unsettling. Elephant Games and Eipix Entertainment are well known for this in their own spooky games.
• Scenery Porn: But on the other hand, much of the abandoned settings and the zoomed-in scenes are so well made and colored that it looks beautiful with a sense enchanting and surreal. Even the fact that the emptiness of the settings can arguably make it a case of the Beautiful Void.
• Schedule Fanatic: Huxley's Boarding House has very strict rules for its guests when it comes to daily events, with a strong emphasis on time. This is a result of Meredith Huxley's insanity, which came with an obsession with rules, clocks and routine. You'd better be in your bed at 9:30, or else...
  Meredith, before stabbing Rachel: No one breaks the rules!
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Alister Dalimar is trapped inside the Ball of Fate. His attempt to escape is what brought the Master Detective back to the carnival and when she touched the artifact, she freed him. Madame Fate's ghost tasks her to re-capture him.
  • The Banshee of Dire Grove is also this, although it's suggested that she wasn't evil to begin with. Rather, the ancient people of the area thought that the only way to undo a particularly harsh winter was sacrificing an innocent young woman by locking her away in an icy tomb. The process drove the woman insane and turned her into a vengeful spirit determined to destroy the world as punishment.
• Seashell Bra: Marlena the Mermaid, from Madame Fate, wears one
• Secret Diary: The entire plot of Ravenhearst depends on you recovering missing diary entries.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Madame Fate is about trying to prevent her murder and she asks the Master Detective to help out. She ends up dying because she asked The Master Detective for help. Unknowingly, The Master Detective was followed by the spirit of Charles Dalimar, who is not only angry at The Master Detective for freeing Emma, but also has a grudge against the members of Fate's Carnival for how he was treated when he was one of them, as shown in Escape From Ravenhearst.
• Sequel Hook: The end of Return to Ravenhearst, which leaves a plot thread dangling in the form of Victor's escape.
  • And the dangling thread is finally picked up in Rewind, although given how that game involves Time Travel and wonky time-vortices, it's ambiguous as to precisely how it ties off the loose end.
  • The bonus material in the collector's edition of Escape From Ravenhearst provides The Master Detective with a 'souvenir' of the events in the form of two mysterious sketches of an unknown man. Their existence may suggest that the Ravenhearst arc has one more story to tell.
  • By collecting all the morphing objects in the bonus gameplay of Shadow Lake, The Master Detective receives a ticket to Madame Fate's Carnival, meaning they still have work to do there...
  • Fate's Carnival is revealed to be another story in the Ravenhearst arc, because its Big Bad is Alister Dalimar, Charles's father.
    • Fate herself drops some hints cryptic about the next game, and completing Carnival opens a bonus-content "Secret Room" revealing another sequel, this time to Dire Grove.
  • The end of Sacred Grove's bonus chapter hints that the Master Detective's battle with Alister is not over, as Tanatos has escaped and is clutching Alister's medallion in his beak.
• Seven Deadly Sins: One of the puzzles in Fate's Carnival is themed after this.
• Shared Universe: It hasn't been mentioned in these games, but the MCF games actually take place in the same universe as several of the game series made by Elephant Games (who were the developers for two of the MCF games). In the bonus chapter of Elephant's Grim Tales: The White Lady, it's revealed that Richard Gray, the father of series protagonist Anna Gray, once attended a school for dark magic run by Alister Dalimar.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The whole point of Madame Fate is for you to prevent her murder at midnight, and find out who her would-be killer is. Although you find out who did it, The Reveal occurs only after she dies!
  • Also, the missing man you search for in 13th Skull turns out to be a villain, whose equally-villainous family knew where he was all along. Finding him gets you threatened, then him and his family killed by a vengeful ghost.
• Shout-Out: It seems the designers are huge fans of Rachael Ray, and include at least one reference to her in each game from Return to Ravenhearst onward.
• Sigil Spam: In Huntsville, the culprit in every crime has the same symbol—a black blob with a cartoon skull in the middle—somewhere nearby; two people have it tattooed directly on their bodies, others have it emblazoned on their clothes, and the rest have it on an object they use to commit their misdeeds (such as a laptop or a barrel). It turns out that this the skull and blob is the sigil for the crime organization S.T.A.I.N., and all of the villains in town work for it.
• Significant Anagram: In 13th Skull, a key to discovering the truth about the old mansion lies in the fact that the original owner's name, Ashwin Poncer, is an anagram of Phineas Crown, the pirate - they're the same person.
• Single-Minded Twins: Gwendolyn and Charlotte Somerset in Return to Ravenhearst and Escape from Ravenhearst.
• Skeleton Crew: Captain Crown's crew.
  • Jack Dancer, a notorious gambler.
  • John Ward, a filthy drunkard.
  • Enrique Brower, who never lost a duel.
  • William Knave, the double-crosser.
  • Roberto Confresi, the dandy one.
  • Rachaeli Ray, the crew cook.
  • Howell Davis, an astronomer.
  • Bryce Carver, the enfeebled one.
  • James Bowen, a wealthy veteran.
  • Lawrence Prince, the minstrel.
  • George Booth, the chronicler.
  • Edward Shortshanks, a dwarf.
  • Grace O'Malley, the nurse and the wife of Captain Crown.
• Sleepwalking: The narcoleptic Constance Noring, from Prime Suspects, faced numerous arrests in the past because of her tendency to steal cars while sleepwalking.
• Slow-Motion Fall: Meredith Huxley gets one after getting blown out of the clock tower at the end of Broken Hour.
  • Also, Billy's fall from the bell tower in Shadow Lake.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Jack Talon in Shadow Lake is an in-universe example.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Dr. Goodwell, Fate's Carnival's "Medicine Man" is explicitly called this. Then karma comes into play and he gets killed by one of the snakes he uses to create his bogus nostrums.
• Snap Back: The ending of Ravenhearst shows a colorful and happy version of the manor after Emma's spirit is released. But in Return to Ravenhearst, the mansion reverts back to its frightening, insalubrious self.
• Snark Knight: An option in Dire Grove. On the main menu, you can determine whether the Master Detective's inner monologuing will be Normal, Motivational, or Snarky.
  • The options for 13th Skull are Normal, Southern, and Snarky.
• Snow Means Death: Implied for Dire Grove, where an ancient curse threatens to freeze the entire world.
  • Played literally in the climax, when you go to the world of the dead and discover that it is cold and icy, just like your world has been becoming lately.
• Solve the Soup Cans: Many of the weirder puzzles in the later games.
• Soul Jar: Both Charles' device in Return to Ravenhearst and Alister's black diary in Fate's Carnival.
• Speak in Unison: Rose's twin daughters.
• Stock "Yuck!": Played with in Return to Ravenhearst, where a sign in Charlotte's and Gwendolyn's part of the underground prison states that they cannot get broccoli before they finish their cauliflower. Talk about a child-unfriendly diet.
• Stopped Clock: When Madame Fate dies at midnight, the clock at the back of her trailer freezes.
• String Theory: The coroner in Shadow Lake used this method to try to puzzle out the chain of deaths.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: The Master Detective usually avoids this trope, but in 13th Skull, she runs into it headlong. The librarian looks up the names on the fake IDs she found while exploring the swamp, and calls to tell her that the husband and wife she's supposed to be helping are really con artists and murderers. He urges her to get out of there before they kill her. Nope, she's off to the swamp to confront them... where she finds that they have a gun and she doesn't. Surprise.
  • It gets dumber; if you play through the whole Dialogue Tree for the "hermit in the swamp" (a.k.a. the disguised husband), he draws the gun when he tells you to leave him alone. There's no excuse for being held at gunpoint by the villains at that point.
• Suddenly Voiced: The player has now been given the option to play the Master Detective with a male or female voice in Sacred Grove. (She has been female up to this point.)
• Sundial Waypoint: In Ravenhearst Unlocked, repairing a stained-glass window causes a beam of sunlight to fall through it onto a flagstone in the floor, which conceals a needed item.
• Swiss-Army Tears: This trope is utilized in the following games:
  • In Dire Grove, Sacred Grove, the Mistwalker leader Forest Light needs two ingredients to create a potion that will enable him to track down Derek: a flower from the Banshee's cave and the tears of the Forest Spirit.
  • However, the tears are more or less metaphorical in Escape from Ravenhearst. To solve one of the puzzles at the facsimile of the asylum, the Master Detective needs to create a mixture consisting of "blood, sweat, and tears". The (fake) liquids can be found at each location she's visited in the underground chamber thus far in the game: blood at the hospital, sweat at the asylum, and tears at the facsimile of Charles's childhood home.
  • Again in the figurative sense in the bonus chapter of A Crime in Reflection. Carol encounters a lizard decoration on a chest lodged in ice crystals and takes its jeweled eye. She then uses the eye's orangeish, oily "tears" as an ingredient for a fire potion to melt said ice crystals.
• Take That, Audience!: Try using an item at the wrong place in Return to Ravenhearst (or in either Dire Grove or 13th Skull when Snarky Mode is activated) and you'll be greeted with sarcastic messages in the likes of "Perhaps it's time we hired another detective" or "Somewhere, a town is missing its idiot".
• Take Your Time: At the end of Dire Grove, the possessed graduate students successfully free the imprisoned Banshee, who immediately begins her revenge plan of freezing the entire planet in a perpetual winter. The player can take as long as they want in defeating her, though—there'll never be any consequence for delaying the final puzzle.
• Tears from a Stone:
  • At one point in Fate's Carnival, the angel statue lighting the path to Madame Fate's trailer suddenly starts shedding thick, black tears.
    Master Detective: "Great, now the angel's crying. The angel statue, that is."
  • A precious stone, no less, in the bonus chapter of A Crime in Reflection. When Carol retrieves a jewel resembling a lizard's eye, she uses the yellow-orange, oily substance it "cries" as an ingredient for a potion.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Downplayed. After discovering Derek is the cause of the curse, Samuel and the hunters reluctantly team up with the Mistwalkers in hopes of talking Derek down from his plan. Samuel and the hunters still don't trust them, but the safety and future of the town is more important than their grudge. Once the truth about Peter and Derek comes to light, the Crowfords and Mistwalkers make peace.
• Tick Tock Terror: Several rooms in the gruesome Ravenhearst manor have deep, old-fashioned clock bongs as part of their ambient soundtrack, even if there is no clock seen in the room. Also used quite extensively in Broken Hour.
• Timed Mission: All of the levels, in the first four games. Fortunately, they usually take place between twenty and forty minutes, so you can still Take Your Time.
  • Averted in Return to Ravenhearst, where a clock is running but only for high-score purposes.
  • Also averted in Dire Grove and 13th Skull, though if you're playing the Collector's Editions, you can earn an achievement for finishing within a time limit (6 hours for Dire Grove, 10 for 13th Skull).
• Time Travel: Factors into Escape From Ravenhearst. When Victor escapes at the end of Return, he actually goes back in time and sets up just about everything that happens in Escape.
• Tin-Can Robot: 1011001, one of the suspects from Prime Suspects, is a jobless welding robot who was fired when its employer found out that humans require less electricity than robots, and who "knocks off convenience stores to support his 10w40 addiction".
• To Be a Master: This trope is the main goal of the very first game, Huntsville, where the detective is a new recruit aiming as becoming a Master Detective.
• Too Dumb to Live: Arguably, the graduate students in Dire Grove, who persist in entering the closed-off titular community and breaking into the locked-up bed and breakfast (which has no electricity or heat) in order to solve their mystery. It's like they were begging for the plot to happen to them.
  • Smack talkin' ghosts of prisoners in the maximum security wing? Yeah, real smart there, Jack Talon.
• The Tragic Rose: Rose Somerset. The poor woman was abducted with her daughters Gwendolyn and Charlotte by Charles Dalimar, kept in a gruesome hidden complex beneath Ravenhearst Manor while being separated from her daughters, and her soul powered Charles's immortality device for over a century. Even worse, Key to Ravenhearst reveals that she is the mother of Victor Dalimar, and that Charles also fathered the twins (quite possibly through Child by Rape). All three of her children sadly inherited the Dalimar madness and became some of the most murderous monsters the Master Detective ever faced.
• Treasure Map: A map of the surroundings of the Poncer mansion leading to the treasure of the legendary pirate Phineas Crown is at the center of the plot from 13th Skull.
• Tricked into Signing: At the very beginning of Black Crown, the Master Detective is asked to sign some administrative papers by Dr. Nathaniel Norton in order to see one of his patients. She really should have read it before signing, because Norton was one of Phineas Crown's minions, and the paper was in fact a contract that bound her to join the pirate's crew.
• Troubled Abuser: Charles Dalimar, through and through.
• TV Head Robot: TV Head Mannequins are something of a staple element of games involving Alister or his assorted evil descendants.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: After you're done looking for stuff, you'll have to solve a puzzle that usually has nothing to do with looking for objects! These started out as simple tile-switching jigsaws, but became weirder and more abstract with each successive game... much like this series as a whole, come to think of it...
• The Unfettered: Alister Dalimar, full stop. The man devoted his entire life solely into the search for immortality. He spent more than five hundred years seeking it, and nigh everything he ever did was driven by this goal. His quest led him among others to search for an Ancient Artifact on the entire globe, conduct some a wide number of gruesome experiments, brainwash and even kill many innocents, sink his own hometown into the sea, and kill his very own offspring (at the very least his daughter Lily and his granddaughter Gwendolyn) - it was even hinted that he had children solely to use them as pawns in his plans in the first place.
• Unfinished Business: The ghosts of Charles's victims have a form of this; they're trapped in the house until the Master Detective steps in to make things right.
  • Charles himself has this throughout the series, since the end of Escape From Ravenhearst explicitly states that he will never stop hunting the Master Detective.
    • It also reveals that Charles's unexpected appearance in Madame Fate was also this trope.
  • After the events of Fate's Carnival and Sacred Grove, Alister has taken over the vendetta against the Master Detective.
• Uptown Girl: Frances Boyle in The Revenant's Hunt was a very wealthy heiress who fell in love with Avondel's resident reject Alvin Croaker. Things did not end well.
• Using You All Along: The Lawson family (real name Blanstons) made up the entire story about the father disappearing in the swamps. They only wanted the Detective to find The Pirate Booty before getting rid of her and fleeing.
• Vanity License Plate: The Master Detective's car has one in Escape.
• Villain Protagonist: The player uses Alister in Ravenhearst Unlocked's bonus mode, where their final objective is to capture and incapacitate the original Master Detective
• Villainous Rescue: In 13th Skull, when Captain Crown kills off the entire family of villains, he inadvertently saves the Master Detective - who was about to be murdered by them - in the process.
• Villain Team-Up: At the end of Ravenhearst Unlocked, Alister and Baron Ravenhearst agree that while they hate each other, they hate the Master Detective (both of them) more.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Part of the Backstory of Dire Grove.
• The Voice: The Queen, at the end of Madame Fate, via telephone.
• The Voiceless: While the Master Detective does speak, she isn't given a voice actor until Sacred Grove.
• "Wash Me" Graffiti: In Prime Suspects, the words "Wash Me" are written in the dirt in the upper-right corner of Millie the Milliner's front window.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Early in Shadow Lake, a news report is interrupted when a screaming, hollow face suddenly appears on the screen. We briefly see a technical difficulties sign right after it.
• Wealth's in a Name: Phil T. Rich from Millionheir is, well, filthy rich.
• Wealthy Philanthropist: Phil T. Rich, from Millionheir, is one. Doubles as an Uncle Pennybags.
• Welcome to Corneria: Try to talk to any of the NPCs in 13th Skull when they don't have the yellow exclamation point above their heads, and this is the sort of result you can expect.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Derek Crowford kidnapped the Mistwalkers' sacred fawn in order to force them to return his brother, Peter. In a case of miscommunication, his ransom message was lost and the Mistwalkers and the Forest Spirit had attacked the town.
• Whack-a-Monster: The Whack-a-Troll mini-game in Return to Ravenhearst is one, and it apparently drove the Master Detective completely nuts. It is mentioned again in Escape from Ravenhearst and Key to Ravenhearst.
• Wham Line: In Madame Fate:
  Madame Fate: (to The Master Detective) I was wrong! It wasn't them [the carnies]! It was you! This is all YOUR FAULT!!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The missing Blackpool folks in Escape From Ravenhearst are seen tethered to the final house, but you don't actually see if they got loose after it blows up and you meet the ex-ghosts in the garden.
  • If you open your casebook after that scene, they all died.
  • In Ravenhearst Unlocked, the Master Detective locks Charlotte in the Asylum's storage room. She's well and alive, and responds to the Master Detective's taunts after Tanatos's departure; but she isn't mentioned at the end of the storyline, even with her sister's death.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: ...Madame Fate will die in the eponymous game. Used verbatim at the reveal of Twyla the Contortionist's fate as well.
  "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, Twyla. When the clock strikes twelve, you'll be fit to be tied!"
• Where It All Began: The Master Detective returns not once, but twice, to Ravenhearst Manor. And even after it burns to the ground, she comes back again to the site when it's been reconstructed as a morbid museum.
• Whispering Ghosts: In Ravenhearst and Return to Ravenhearst, the ghosts of the people imprisoned in the manor are sometimes heard whispering at the Master Detective, either pleading for help or warning her that the place is ludicrously dangerous.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Madame Fate is all about preventing this trope from occurring. The titular character claims to be an innocent victim of an impending doom...which she blames on her staff, who she outright declares "miserable lackeys." Investigating each suspect reveals that Madame Fate is a Bad Boss who mistreats the carnies. Some of them have their deaths coming, but others seem genuinely innocent or have simple desires, like Bianca the Daredevil, who has been suffering migraines and wants to stop performing some of her stunts to heal (she's perfectly willing to do safer ones), or Tabitha the Lion Tamer, whose favorite lion was poisoned by Madame Fate herself just because she didn't like cats. As such, it's hard to feel much sympathy for the good Madame considering what a Jerkass she is to anyone who mildly annoys her, even when she does die at the hands of Charles Dalimar at the end of the game.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: While they did some really gruesome things to maintain their eternal life, both Meredith Huxley and her father Harold hate it. Harold outright states that it is a curse, while Meredith has been driven completely insane by this life she did not want in the first place. She sees it as a string of "broken hours", where she is continuously forced to remember that she is alive while her beloved children are dead.
• Whodunnit to Me?: The whole plot of Madame Fate: the fortune teller foresees her own death and asks the Master Detective to find the murderer before it is too late.
• Windmill Scenery: An ominous old windmill lies near Elmore's farm in The Malgrave Incident. It has been modified to be the main source of electricity on the island.
• Witch Doctor: Momma Aimee in 13th Skull.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: At the end of 13th Skull, the young girl says mockingly, "Stupid detective, there's no such thing as ghosts." ...right before being killed by a ghost.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Madame Fate calls in the Master Detective to prevent her murder. It turns out the killer is at Fate's Carnival because the Master Detective is there and because Madame Fate requested the Master Detective in the first place. Talk about irony.
  • Shouldn't that be You Can't Save Fate?
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: In Dire Grove, Allison is still free from the Banshee's possession at the beginning of the game, and can be heard desperately begging for help on a radio the Master Detective finds. But no matter how quickly the player works, Allison has to end up frozen and possessed by the time they find her.
• You Look Like You've Seen a Ghost: Invoked verbatim at the end of 13th Skull.
• You Won't Feel a Thing!: At the end of Broken Hour, when Meredith tries to stab the Master Detective:
  Meredith: "Stop! Death brings no pain. Come with me!"
• Your Head A-Splode: Downplayed in both Dire Grove and Escape from Ravenhearst where the bursting heads are animatronic ones.

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