Team Empreintes on The Granny Detective Society

Most detective games hand you a corpse in the first five minutes. The Granny Detective Society hands you a cup of tea and a nosy neighbour. Made by Team Empreintes — a two-person studio founded in Angouleme in 2024 by the developers who go by Jaximus and Vidu — it is a tender, non-violent deduction game that trades trench coats and dead bodies for cardigans and curiosity. We caught up with the pair to talk about their unusual heroine and the ideas behind her.

From Fireside Feelings to a secret society

Team Empreintes' first game, Fireside Feelings, was a small, warm experience — and that warmth is clearly the studio's north star. The Granny Detective Society keeps the cosy tone but wraps it around a proper mystery structure.

“We love detective games, but we were tired of every case starting with a murder,” the team told us. “We wanted to know: can you keep the thrill of deduction — the moment where everything clicks — without any violence at all? Madeleine was our answer.”

Madeleine is the star: a curious grandmother who starts out simply watching her neighbours from her window, and is soon recruited into a secret society of detective grandmothers. It is a premise that sounds like a children's book and plays like a logic puzzle box.

Every grannytective is a new power

The clever hook is structural. As Madeleine rises through the society, she unlocks fellow “grannytectives,” and each one is not just a character but a new gameplay power — a fresh way of perceiving information you simply could not access before.

“Each grannytective changes how you read a scene,” the studio explained. “One lets you notice things others miss, another opens a different kind of conversation. The goal was that feeling of permanent renewal — every few hours, the game teaches you a new way to look, and old puzzles suddenly make sense.”

It is a design lineage you can trace directly. The team cites Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol and Duck Detective as touchstones — games that trust the player to connect dots rather than follow a waypoint. The Granny Detective Society wants that same click of understanding, minus the grim subject matter.

A tight, deliberate runtime

The studio is aiming for roughly six to eight hours — a length in keeping with Obra Dinn and its peers, dense with deduction rather than padded with busywork.

“We would rather make six brilliant hours than twenty that drag,” they said. “Every grannytective, every case, has to earn its place. When there is nothing left to teach you, the game should end.”

Where and when

The Granny Detective Society is targeted for PC (Windows) in Q1 2027. A Switch port is firmly on the wishlist — the team clearly sees the game as a natural fit for a handheld, curled up on the sofa — but for now the studio is keeping its focus tight while two people build the thing.

It is a small game with a genuinely fresh idea: proof that the deduction genre does not need a body count to give you that electric moment of “wait — I've got it.” If a society of sleuthing grandmothers sounds like your kind of mystery, this is one indie worth keeping an eye on as it heads toward 2027.