Kayfo Games have released Detective Syra, a narrative driven, hidden objects, murder mystery set in the colourful miljö of Senegal.

The game which is being described as the “first narrative hidden objects game released in West Africa” is the studios sixth mobile launch in their five years and step into a new sub genre. GIA caught up with Kayfo Games co-founder Julien Herbin to learn more.

What lessons from your previous games have been expanded on to flesh out the game play for Detective Syra?

Kayfo Games will be celebrating its fifth anniversary next year, and of course we’ve learned a lot since we started. We haven’t taken much from our previous games in terms of gameplay, because “Detective Syra: Murder in Dakar” is different in many ways from our previous titles: it’s a new genre, it’s our first narrative game, and many members of the team were new and hadn’t worked together in the past.

Today, we can say that the game has benefited greatly from our past experiences: we plan and define our projects better, we’ve improved our internal validation processes and our internal communication is much more fluid.

Young developers/studios tend to underestimate the power of tools and cheats in game production. I think this time we’ve developed the right amount of tools to make production as smooth as possible, and that’s kept us on target.

Finally, we’ve had a lot more playtesting to get initial feedback from players than in the past. Some of them really got involved and helped us correct certain levels or dialogues. I’d like to thank them for that!

To sum up, I think we’re becoming increasingly aware of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and who we’re doing it for.

Was there a specific reason you opted to make a hidden objects game and how does it elevate the investigative aspects of the game?

The idea of creating a hidden object game dates back to 2019: I was traveling with an African airline and exploring their games library when I came across a hidden object game, which I ended up playing for a few hours or so. I really enjoyed it, but thought it was a shame that the game didn’t take us to Africa. There was an opportunity to show us what we were going to experience. Shortly afterwards, we started building a prototype for a hidden object game, but we couldn’t push it far enough due to a lack of financial resources.

We always thought this genre would be perfect for telling stories and promoting African cultures in a compelling way. We’ve seen a number of Western titles do very well in recent years, so why not us? When the time came, we built a better prototype, presented it to Orange and were lucky enough to get their financial and technical support last year. Without them, it would have taken us much longer to complete our project, so thank you to the Orange teams who believed us!

Are there any specific goals set for the release (in terms of revenue, downloads etc) and how do you hope to reach those targets?

As we’re new to this genre, we haven’t set any precise targets for this first version. We’re starting with a very limited marketing budget, because we want to get feedback from players first, so we need to understand what they like and don’t like about our game, and make it even better before we do more.

You’ll probably be surprised to learn that we’ve decided to distribute our game as a premium experience. But F2P hasn’t proved profitable in West Africa so far; in fact, we haven’t managed to break even with any of our F2P games. Knowing that “Detective Syra” will be available not only on Android and iOS, but also on the Windows Store and Mac OS App Store, we’d be happy to sell our first few thousand copies on all platforms by the end of the year.

But for us, the release of “Detective Syra: Murder in Dakar” marks just the beginning of our adventure into the hidden object genre. We’ve always seen the game as a series that will take Syra to some of the greatest places in Africa. Today, we’re asking players what will be her next destination?

Detective Syra is now globally available to play on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows Store.

AppStore : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/detective-syra-hidden-objects/id6449259903
PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=games.Kayfo.DetectiveSyra&hl=en