As part of its ongoing expansion into Games, today The Atlantic is launching its first immersive-narrative game: Lemony Snicket’s Suspicious Incident in Dubious Park. The game transports characters to the center of a fictional scene––written by the author Lemony Snicket––to solve a murder mystery.

The Atlantic is launching the game exclusively for subscribers in its first week, before opening it up to wider audiences on July 20.

A combination of a traditional whodunit and a visual scavenger hunt, the game lets players take on the role of a detective who has been dropped into a locked-down park where someone has been murdered in broad daylight. Navigating an illustrated map of the park, players will comb its grounds for clues and interrogate a cast of peculiar witnesses and eccentric parkgoers to reconstruct the sequence of events and catch the perpetrator still hiding somewhere in the park.

To create the game, The Atlantic worked with Lemony Snicket to create the game’s cast of suspicious and dubious characters, dialogue, and plot. The Atlantic then trained an LLM for each character based on their unique dialogue, motives, and background, allowing players to interrogate and interact with the characters directly to uncover the perpetrator of the crime. The game is illustrated by the Eisner Award–winning comic artist Michael Kupperman.

Last year, The Atlantic launched its Games Hub––a destination for puzzles and play on TheAtlantic.com and in the app. This followed the release of the popular word puzzle Bracket City. All Atlantic games are playable for the public, and full archives are available for Atlantic subscribers.

Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com