Review: EXIT the Game KIDS | Riddles in Monsterville

RATING: 0 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: +57:34

C is for Cookie, that’s good enough for me…, wait, that’s the wrong Cookie Monster! Oh, well… *crunch crunch crunch*

Story

Watch out! The cookie monsters are on the loose! They have stolen all of the valuable cookie jars from your neighborhood. But you won’t let the cheeky thieves get away that easily, though. You bravely follow them into Monsterville. However, you don’t remain undiscovered there for long. The fluffy monsters are soon on your trail and are fascinated by you.They are happy that you came to visit and want to reward your courage.

The monsters present you with six different riddles to solve together! For each riddle you solve, you receive one of the six silver keys to open the cookie jars.

Can you solve all of the riddles? Which cookie jars can you get back, and what secret treasures do your neighbors hide in them? Is it just cookies?

Oh, cookies… those delicious dessert disks of happiness. How can anyone resist their sugary appeal? *Hint: they usually can’t. The sweet treat is clearly beloved the world over, including by the fuzzy, furry residents of Monsterville!

The monsters love them so much, they’ve stolen a whole bunch of the freshly-baked delights! It’s up to the neighbors to confront the floofy fiends, retrieve the cookies, and put an end to the confectionary chaos!

Scenic

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.

We mentioned that Thames & Kosmos goes the route of mostly card-based escape home games. Each edition is produced to a fairly high level of quality – with fairly thick, glossy textures that have the feel of a deck of playing cards. These, however, are significantly larger than average, with dimensions of 4.75″ x 3.25″, to ensure children have better visibility. Each Exit: The Game KIDS edition also includes a themed booklet spanning multiple pages that connects with tasks identified on the cards. A 4.75″ cardstock decoder wheel, always featuring three rotatable discs that align to highlight an answer code is included in every box.

Exit: The Game titles also make use of something they like to call “strange items.” Basically, these are “anything else” left in the box. In the case of Riddles in Monsterville, the strange items are paper tiles with images of flowers on one side, and monsters on the reverse.

Each game’s respective page within the Kosmos Games Helper App is lightly themed to its storyworld, featuring package art as the wallpaper for the time clock and background music scores to help transport the adventure off the cards and bring it to life all around players.

The game is extremely visually appealing to children, as they are the intended audience. The box is festooned with vibrant images of the Monsterville residents, all of whom can be accurately described as “cute and adorable.” The various cards and creatures featured within the container are so boldly colored that it resembles a crayon factory explosion.

Puzzles

The riddles provided by the monsters are all found on the game cards. These puzzles are separated into six different categories, individually designated with their own unique color, symbol, and objective. The themes are referred to as “Smiley, Snail Trail, Outline, Favorite Food, Puzzle Piece, and Lasso.”

The game is designed to be replayable, with each card in any given pile providing a different combination of three monsters. Once each task is solved, cookie-hunters are rewarded with a key to “unlock” one of the stolen cookie jars.

MOST of the mini-games are clever and enjoyable. They are also simple enough to be easily solved by children. The red cards, or the “Favorite Food” challenge, prove to be an outlier. Riddles in Monsterville is supposed to be completely playable in 20 minutes or less. This particular task is so convoluted in its execution that the Escape Authority team members had to add a further hour to actually even remotely solve it.

Overall

Escape Authority has a defined set of conditions that, if ANY are met during gameplay, result in an automatic disqualification and the dreaded Zero-Key rating. Riddles in Monsterville unfortunately fulfills that criteria. All puzzles must be solvable, done so by following the established rules of the game. One of the challenges fails to do so; it literally cannot be played to completion using the provided instruction manual.

The phrasing of the directions leads to ambiguity in gameplay. The exact wording found in the instruction manual reads “each card shows one food and which monsters like to eat it. Find the three monsters that like the foods which are shown at each table setting… IMPORTANT: the monsters may have no other favorite food.” This is an extremely unclear statement, as it resulted in Escape Authority team members finding multiple potential solutions for any given card in this category, with no indication on how to determine the “correct” answer. If two adults were not able to identify an accurate response, even going so far as to test all available options numerous times over, there is no possible way that a young child (the actual targeted demographic) will be able to solve the riddle.

Riddles in Monsterville had the potential to be a solidly entertaining game, and was actually going to have a 5-Key rating before this glaring issue came to light. It is unfortunate that one single feature completely derailed what was otherwise a delightful experience. Even the monsters are disappointed by the crumbs left behind.