The Morrison Game FactoryPostCuriousEscape roomTabletopThis is an adorable game with the best storyline I’ve ever encountered in a boxed escape. It is heartwarming and emotional, which I never thought possible from a tabletop game. We really liked a lot of the puzzles and felt many of them were very very unique. The box design was so beautiful and so immersive. Despite the box being fairly simple in its contents, we enjoyed finding hidden surprises amidst the contents. We had two cons about the game that almost pulled our review down to a like: 1. The first puzzle required too much outside knowledge. We were not familiar with the name/term of the decoding skill needed to solve the first puzzle. While it is still solvable without that knowledge, it’s too difficult to get there. It set us off on a wrong note/rough start that made us very skeptical of the rest of the game. 2. The game was meant to be linear, but it often accidentally wasn’t. Meaning, we solved puzzles too early because we had them there, but they gave us codes we didn’t know what to do with or tried on the wrong things, but then it turned out later that we were given more information to “solve” those puzzles that would have made it so much easier to actually solve them. So we greatly overcomplicated the game on accident. This made the game feel extremely difficult, when in reality it was just that we were solving puzzles with only half the information we were supposed to have. So after all was said and done, it would have been better to have the puzzles revealed step by step through separated envelopes or something that made the game play flow better. But like I said, this game is absolutely worth playing and just remember that if it feels like you don’t have all the information to solve something, chances are you don’t and should wait for more. Overall, the cons didn’t outweigh the good, but it had the potential to be a better game with a tad bit of reworking.
EXIT: The Game - The Forbidden CastleThames & KosmosEscape roomTabletopThis is one of their older boxes and it shows. The puzzles are not organized as well as their newer boxes- making it difficult to figure out which page went with which card and what order to solve things in. I get that it is a higher difficulty rating, but too many jumps and assumptions were needed and the instructions were not clear for many of the puzzles. Also, later puzzles make it clear when something will be cut, this one did not (we weren’t sure what were fold vs. cut lines but didn’t want to mess up a puzzle by testing our ideas/theories). It also felt relatively boring storyline wise compared to the newer ones. I was also not a fan that the decoder disk was not numbers and rather key shapes, it led to a decrease in communication between players because it was easier for just one person to do everything involved with that since you need 1 specific chart.
