Inside the studio
How to write a situation puzzle that plays fair
Illustration: The Keys in His Pocket
The reaction we want at the end of a Post Mortem story is a small, annoyed laugh: you could have seen it. That laugh only comes if the game played fair. Here is how we build a riddle, and what we promise you every time you open one. If you write your own for a game night, the same tests work.
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The statement never lies
Every sentence you read stays true once you know the answer. If you were fooled, it was by a picture you built yourself, never by a false fact slipped into the text. That is the whole contract of a situation puzzle, and we hold to it word by word.
The reveal explains the scene, it does not cancel it. "It was a dream" or "he was mad" makes the puzzle go away instead of solving it, and you never finish one of our stories feeling the ground was pulled from under you.
How a riddle gets built
Every guide says to start from the ending and hide something. Fine, but hiding is the easy part. The work is making sure a table can get it back. This is the order we follow.
- Pick the assumption to break. A good twist is one default the reader brings without noticing (who the person is, where they are, what a word usually means), chosen on purpose and broken cleanly.
- Write the paradox in one sentence: X, and yet Y, where X and Y cannot both hold in the picture a reader forms. If that sentence is flat, no amount of atmosphere will save the riddle.
- Write the statement. Three to five sentences in the present tense, with two or three concrete details a table can ask about. The strangeness has to come from facts, not adjectives: an object in someone's hand can be questioned, "eerie" cannot.
- Write the solution. The whole story, explaining every oddity the statement planted. Leave one unexplained and the reveal reads as a cheat.
- Try to break it. Check that each sentence stays true under the solution. Write the three best wrong answers a sharp table would give: each has to die on the text or on one clean question. Then play out the first dozen questions on paper. Three dead-end noes in a row means a step is missing.
You can get there by asking
A Post Mortem story is not a guessing game. You reach the answer through discoveries: a gesture, a circumstance, a relationship, each one something you can ask about. In the app they are the facts listed under the card, each one blacked out until the narrator confirms you found it. The pleasure is in the path, not in hitting the one detail the author had in mind.
And only one story fits. If another explanation holds up against every fact and every reasonable question, the riddle is not ready for you.
No hidden knowledge, no traps
You should never need specialist trivia you were not warned about. Our test: could someone who knows only the pack's title name the fact unprompted? In The Labours of Hercules, the twelve labours are fair game. A minor genealogy is fair game nowhere.
Realism is the default. A double meaning is the exception, so you are not left suspecting every noun of being a pun.
Dark, not gory
Death is often where a story starts. Violence is never what it is about. A murder can set the scene, but the act itself is never walked through, and the artwork keeps to the same line: macabre and deadpan, never gory. The interest stays with your reasoning. A Post Mortem riddle can be played around a dinner table.
The picture shows the scene, not the answer
Every story has its own artwork, the first image you form of the scene. It shows what the statement says, no more and no less. An invented detail would be a false lead the text never set, and we do not allow a picture what we would not allow a sentence. A second image waits with the solution, in the game.
Titles follow the same rule: they point at the false obvious, never at the answer. Our free riddle pages show the statement and its front artwork, and keep the explanation for the game. The surprise is what you are giving us your time for.
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Each language gets its own riddle
A literal translation can keep the facts and lose the puzzle. So the French and English versions are written, not translated: the false obvious, the rhythm and the title are reworked so each reader has the same fair route to the same story. When a twist only works in one language and no honest rewrite exists, that riddle stays in its language.
A published riddle keeps being read
We reread the whole catalogue with the same standards as a new story. When a statement lets another explanation through or a verb cheats, we rewrite it. You keep what you had already solved.