Murder Matrix
Cozy logic-deduction puzzle game for iOS. No ads, no timers, no accounts.
Murder Matrix is a cozy logic-deduction puzzle for iOS. Each case asks you to place suspects on a small grid based on the clues they give, and the empty square left over reveals the victim. It’s a small, careful game, closer to a crossword than a thriller. Designed and built solo, pure SwiftUI, no third-party dependencies, from first principles.
How to play
Read the clues. Each suspect tells you something about where they were standing relative to the others. Place them on the grid so no two share a row or column, using the clues to eliminate positions one at a time the way you’d work a logic puzzle on paper. When all but one suspect is placed, the last empty square reveals itself, and whoever shares that room with it is the murderer.
Six locations, three difficulty tiers
- Six original locations, each with its own pastel palette and floor plan, so the puzzle grid itself changes shape and mood from case to case.
- Procedurally generated puzzles with one guaranteed solution. Every case is unique: nothing is hand-authored or reused, so there’s no puzzle database to exhaust.
- Three difficulty tiers: Rookie, Detective, and Mastermind, scaling grid size and clue density rather than adding artificial obstacles.
- A daily challenge with a shareable seed, so you can compare your solve time against a friend working the exact same case.
- No ads, tracking, or accounts to set up. Open the app and there’s a puzzle waiting, nothing to configure first.
A cozy puzzle with no timer pressure
Nothing about the format punishes the player for taking their time. Cozy was the design target from the start: the tension comes from the logic itself, not from the interface pressuring you to hurry. The daily challenge is the one nod to competition in the whole game, and even that stays asynchronous: you compare a solve time with a friend whenever it’s convenient, not against a live leaderboard ticking in real time.
Built with SwiftUI, no third-party trackers
SwiftUI handles the interface, SwiftData handles local storage, and CloudKit provides optional cross-device sync for anyone who plays on both an iPhone and an iPad. Everything else runs entirely on-device, with no server component and no third-party analytics or SDKs collecting data in the background. That’s a deliberate match for a game whose whole pitch is that it doesn’t want anything from you beyond attention to the puzzle.