For Fans of Columbo

Rian Johnson's Knives Out does something Columbo's creators understood immediately: it tells you the killer's identity early, then pulls the rug on what that even means. The pleasure is never the secret; it's the architecture of the trap. Glass Onion doubles down on this, making the inverted structure itself the subject. These films reintroduced the form to audiences who thought mystery meant hidden-until-the-end, and they did it by leaning into what Columbo always knew: watching a brilliant mind work is more entertaining than a third-act reveal.

Disco Elysium gives you a detective who is, on the surface, an absolute disaster: amnesiac, substance-wrecked, wearing a terrible tie. Yet the investigation proceeds through conversation, observation, and the slow accumulation of detail into a picture no one else sees coming. That's pure Columbo DNA. The game is also preoccupied with class, with the way privilege insulates people from accountability, and with a detective whose apparent haplessness is itself a kind of method. The medium is radically different; the spirit is identical.

Obra Dinn gives you the deaths, frozen in time, and asks you to reconstruct what happened and who is responsible. Columbo gives you the killer committing the crime, then reconstructs responsibility through evidence. The direction is opposite; the pleasure is the same: logic applied rigorously to physical and behavioral fact, with no guessing, no luck, no revelation from an informant. Both trust the audience to do real inferential work, and both reward patience over impulsiveness.