Foolish Mortals Review: A Spooky Good Time For Point & Click Fans

The point and click genre has made a fantastic comeback in recent years. There are a lot of games trying to offer a new experience or even redefine what these games can be for a new generation. Then there are games like Foolish Mortals which don’t seem that interested in doing something new, but rather seek to give players a version of the games they have loved in the past. While it isn’t particularly innovative or new, it does offer an excellent experience that fans of the genre will love.

A Doomed Wedding

Murphy McCallan is a young auditor who has come to the remote island of Devil’s Rock in search of a 13 million dollar missing fortune that has been lost for thirty years since a wedding was seemingly interrupted and the entire guest list disappeared never to be heard from again. The house where the wedding was to take place has since become a local legend with people afraid to go anywhere near it.

In truth, Murphy wasn’t just randomly assigned here. He’s been obsessed with this case since he first heard about it and has worked hard to get to Devil’s Rock so he can do his own investigation. When he gets there he finds a case involving voodoo, ghosts, and all sort of supernatural events going on. In Foolish Mortals whether supernatural things are happening isn’t a question; the mystery is why they’re taking place.

Finding Its Way

Foolish Mortals got off to a slightly slow start for me. While each location is dripping in atmosphere, the characters didn’t do much for me in the first couple of hours of the game. It wasn’t until I reached the house and really got going before it got its hooks into me but once it did, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

Some of the issue though comes from Murphy himself. While Foolish Mortals is full of interesting characters, I’m not sure I’d count our protagonist among them. He has a fairly generic backstory and while the voice acting for him is strong, as it is for the rest of the cast, he ends up feeling a bit like a wannabe Guybrush Threepwood. There’s an in over his head quality to him that feels familiar and he makes similar wisecracking comments regularly. There just doesn’t seem to be much beneath the surface though and while some late game twists involving him are interesting, they don’t do much to give his character real depth. I just found myself wanting more. Still, the game’s main antagonist is a ton of fun and the cast of characters you’ll meet once the game really gets going should keep you coming back.

Traditional Isn’t A Bad Thing

From a gameplay perspective, this is about as traditional a point and click as you could ask for. You wander around a variety of different environments, talk to the various people in the cast, and gather resources that you can use in a wide variety of ways. You’ll combine items, use them in different situations, and figure out the weird and obscure ways the game expects you to combine things. Some of the ways Foolish Mortals expects you to use the things you find are very strange, but that’s right in line with the way the genre has always worked. Still, be prepared to do some serious trial and error and to search every nook and cranny of each area.

I did end up having some nagging issues with the interface here. In particular, the decision to not allow you to leave the map screen without selecting a new location is very annoying. You can select the location you were already in, but then you’re stuck moving back to the entrance which might at times require walking an awfully long distance. That Murphy’s movement speed feels quite slow, even when you tell him to run, doesn’t help. There are a few puzzles where the specific way the game makes you execute things also feels a bit anachronistic but none of them are that difficult to adjust to. The menu system, including save options, is also unnecessarily difficult to access and not well designed but this was not a huge deal.

There are a few modern touches that are appreciated here, particularly a strong hint system which gives you help with solving the game’s many mysteries. Specifically, it gives you as much or as little help as you want. You can get just a vague hint or keep going until the game pretty much spells out exactly what to do, though you still may need to find items or figure out small aspects of how to trigger things even with the full hints. I avoided these for most of the game, mostly only accessing them at the end of the game so I could tell you about them, but I do think Foolish Mortals does a good job of allowing you the amount of help you need.

Conclusion

Foolish Mortals does a good job of a lot of things, and once it gets going it offers a spooky good time for fans of adventure games. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and I do wish its interface had a bit of an overhaul but fans of adventure titles will have an excellent time with it. This isn’t a game that’s going to win over anyone who doesn’t already love the genre though.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Inklingwood Studios; Developer: Inklingwood Studios; Players: 1; Released: November 5th, 2025; ESRB: N/A; MSRP: $19.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Foolish Mortals provided by the publisher.