RATING: 0 Keys RESULT: Unplayable REMAINING: (We quit.)
Did you know there’s actually a crime worse than murder? And what is it, you may ask? Allowing Spin Master to continue producing At Home escape games.
Rascals! As you enter the crime scene, you realize you’re in trouble. Although you’ve solved numerous murder cases in the past and you aren’t easily shocked, you’ve stumbled upon a real doozy.
This isn’t just an ordinary murder case. Not only was Theodore Jones a man of great fortune and fame, but the note found on the body was highly disturbing. If you don’t solve this case quickly, there’ll be blood on your hands…
Murder Mystery takes a typical detective trope and, well, keeps it typical. Someone was murdered, so now you have just sixty minutes to figure it out or, I don’t know, he’ll be, murdered-er? Yeah, that’s right! There’s something worse than murder!
It’s this game. This game is worse than getting murdered.
As we’ve touched on previously, being a home game, we define “Scenic,” from a graphic design perspective, as well as the quality, weight and feel of print materials inside the box.
Spin Master’s product is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of print qualities. Some larger graphics and maps are produced in grand scale on thick, high gloss durable papers. Many other elements in each round are thinner paper and tear easily. Some of those items will be damaged through the course of normal play, but thankfully links are available to print your own replacements.
Spin Master had an official companion app for background music loops and themed photo frames for each game, but that seems to have been inexplicably discontinued and removed from the app store. It’s a bizarre choice to opt to remove an already existing service that betters the guest experience, but this is Spin Master, after all. In its place, a much less powerful tab labeled as an “app” can be found on the official Escape Room: The Game website.
As an expansion pack, Murder Mystery requires the separate purchase of Spin Master’s original Escape Room: The Game product. From there, would-be detectives will borrow its functioning game timer, called the Chrono Decoder. It doubles as several different cipher keys you’ll need throughout the games, which felt a bit clunky and awkward at times. During game play, to unlock “rooms” (again, sealed envelopes holding your next location and puzzles) you’ll insert four different plastic keys – aligned in the correct order – into the physical game clock itself. Get it right and be rewarded with a chime; but if you’re wrong, you’ll be chastised by a buzzer sound effect.
This adds an interesting sense of technology to the Spin Master box – but the unfortunate truth is that we have had more than one occasion across the Spin Master suite of products where our game clock malfunctioned, denying correct answer combinations repeatedly. To make matters worse, each wrong answer physically takes time off your clock – a move intended on paper to discourage brute forcing the codes, but in practice during a clearly broken game only serves to even further frustrate its players.
Each task requires detectives to decipher a four digit code, which could be comprised of any combination of letters, numbers, shapes or directions. Individual puzzles will each lead to one of the four positions of a level’s code, and can be solved in any order making for a fairly non-linear gameplay experience suitable for slightly larger groups.
Murder Mystery’s case unfolds by first asking sleuths to identify the murder weapon. The evidence left for this at the crime scene is intuitive enough, leading to the false impression that perhaps this game won’t be so bad after all. From there it’s just one trainwreck after another – something that may be ironic given our murder victim’s background in the railway industry.
From a hint perspective, Spin Master provides scrambled hint cards that – when slipped inside a red decoder sleeve will become readable. In Murder Mystery, there weren’t nearly enough hints printed on the cards to assist us through this perpetual logic-leap of a game, resulting in us losing even more time trying to locate the online solution PDF.
At one point, we were so frustrated that we threw our hands up and just looked up an answer. Nothing we thought it might be could work, and no hint cards were sufficiently helping matters. Imagine our surprise upon reading the actual printed answer, entering it exactly and being told by the Chrono Decoder that it was incorrect. SIX TIMES. Which also means six minutes were subtracted as a penalty, despite our answer being correct from the start.
And then that exact same problem happened again entering the third code needed to open the final envelope. Even reading directly from the official answer sheet, the correct codes register as wrong. This game is broken by its very design.
There is a general rule that Spin Master’s Escape Room: The Game titles are consistently among the most frustrating and least fun options on the market. Murder Mystery is the worst one we’ve seen.
Early on, Escape Room: The Game taught us that not all at home options are created equal, quickly sending Spin Master as a brand to the bottom of our preference list. Through multiple stand alone expansion packs, as well as multiple sequel boxes, Escape Room: The Game has been a nearly consistent disappointment full of frustration thanks to its inexcusably illogical gameflow.
Murder Mystery takes things to a whole new level of garbage products, even for Spin Master. With two out of its three codes programmed incorrectly into the Chrono Decoder, this game is literally not even solvable. The real mystery is how this product was ever allowed to be put on sale in the first place.
*Montu, Escape Authority’s VP, Dog Business™ and lead home game correspondent endorses the opinions found within this review.
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Venue: Spin Master Games
Location: At Home Game
Number of Games: 25+ (1 included in this box)
GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:
Duration: 60 minutes
Capacity: 1-4 people
Group Type: Private / You will not be paired with strangers (but if you are, call 911 immediately to report a home invasion.)
Cost (at Publish Time): $5.99 (Amazon.com)
