Tag: escape-room

Magic And Murder Mysteries! A Review of Murders at Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Blade Knife

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So, this is a murder mystery in the world of Magic: The Gathering?  Yup, that’s what this is!  Although its official title is Murders At Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Blade Knife! See the BoardGameGeek listing here.

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My friends and I really enjoy our murder mysteries (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), so we were excited to try this out!

Let’s Take a Look!

Unboxing

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Part of the problem with reviewing Murder Mysteries is that part of the fun of the game is exploring the system!  What’s new in the box?  How do things work?  How does this do stuff differently?  

To that end, we’ll give some very generic thoughts up front which shouldn’t reveal too much of the mystery.   Feel free to stop reading after that if you want to just try it yourself!  After that, we’ll have some minor spoilers, followed by possibly some major spoilers.  Read as far as you want!

High-Level Thoughts: No Spoilers!

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This was a mystery set in the world of Magic: The Gathering.  I know nothing of this world, and my friends know just a little.  Not knowing the world didn’t affect whether or not we could play the murder mystery.  I am sure there there were plenty of “A-HA!” moments for Magic: The Gathering players, but it didn’t stop us from enjoying the game.

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There are a LOT of materials to get through: our game took place in one night for 2.5 hours.  We were able to get to the end of the crime and solve it in one night.  This is a little bit of a slog to get through: there are a lot of materials to read out loud and share!

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In the end, we didn’t love this. 

Rich: Has specific complaints, which he will address in the spoilers section below.
Teresa: Liked it the best, as she got to “perform” and she really enjoys reading stuff out loud. 
Andrew: thought it was a little bit of a slog, as there was so much paperwork to get through!  He still thought it was better than Detective (the Portal Games).  It kinda felt like work.
Sara: It was pretty good.

The general consensus was that it was okay.  Rich liked it the least (probably with a 4/10) and Teresa liked it the most (with a 7/10).   The biggest complaint from everybody was that, even though this was set on the world of magic, specifically Magic: The Gathering, it felt like it could have been in any world: Noir, Cthulu, Voodoo Pirate, something else?   We still dusted for fingerprints, but it felt like someone searched and replaced “dusted for fingerprints” with “used fingerprint ooze“.   Sara pointed out (I think correctly) that this would have been a better mystery set in the 1920s world of Cthulu.

Overall, it was ok.  There were some nice highlights in the experience, but it was a lot of paperwork to slog through, and the mystery itself had its issues.   The 4/10 from Rich was because he really disagreed with how the mystery was handled, Andrew was probably a 5/10, Sara a 6/10, and Teresa a 7/10. 

Maybe you just like living in this world, and just like doing the paperwork of a mystery, and reading the materials: then you, like Teresa may really enjoy this.   The story presented overall was interesting.

If you want to read more specific complaints, read on. 

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Minor Spoilers: Some Issues

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The game comes with a very cool metal pendant!  It serves as your RAMI badge for the game!

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You download an app, and put your phone above it to get “some augmented reality options!”  See above!

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One complaint is that The Case of the Three Blade Knife looked like it would be a cool immersive augmented reality adventure! Look at the cool app above!  But it really wasn’t!!

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We loved The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City (see review here) and it even made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!  We were blown away by the augmented reality here!

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This wasn’t really much of an augmented reality experience. We used the phone just a few times? We could have replaced the phone with a piece of red acetate for some of it.  The best part of the phone app was in the finale, where THE GAME WAS ON RAILS!  At the end of the game, the phone was cool in that it presented the finale really well (cool voice acting), but during the adventure when it mattered, we used it like once.

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How much money was spent on the metal RAMI badge?  How much money was spent on making the app?  If we used the phone more during the adventure, this would have been cooler.  But we didn’t.  The ending was cool, but by that point, the adventure was over and this was just a “presentation”, not an interactive murder mystery with cool augmented reality.

I am not sure it was worth the extra money for the metal RAMI badge and the money to make the app.

I will say that the finale was very cool.

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Major Spoilers: Mystery Progression

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There was a lot of reading: This was work. The materials were well-organized, but getting through them was almost like homework. Still, the materials were very cool: see some above and below.

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There were two major problems with the mystery: 

1) Ignore motive.  The game literally said something like “don’t worry about the motive, just choose someone“.  So, we are looking for means and opportunity only?

2) What are The rules of Magic?  We live in a world of magic, literally Magic: The Gathering!!  What the rules of magic?   Magic can make means and opportunity that much more opaque (teleportation, scrying, Bigby’s giant hands!).   We have NO IDEA what the rules of magic are going into this adventure, so that completely obscures means and opportunity.

I feel like, unless the rules of Magic are somehow explained in some way, it makes it too easy to make a murder mystery unsolvable.  “The murder weapon could have been handled remotely, the murdered could have teleported in and away, the murdered could stop time to leave no trace, etc.., etc., etc., etc.”. 

So, hints, evidence, don’t seem to matter as much.  Because magic can do anything.  This really soured some of us on the mystery after it was revealed:  we had spent 2.5 hours combing through evidence only to have a Deus Ex Machina explanation. I hated it.

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Giant Spoiler!! Read At Your Own Peril!!

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In the end, the only major use of magic was to possess someone and frame them for the murders.  We had no clue this was happening, we had no books to read, we had no idea.  We just “guessed” the murderer based on location, and then went to the endgame.  By the time you are in endgame, the game is on rails and it’s easy to solve.

This game pissed me off because it didn’t feel like a mystery.  You just guessed at someone based on  location, but all the while “magic” (whose rules were unexplained) was the driving cause.  

This was more of a “explore this world, make some guesses, and enjoy the story”.  If I had known that going in, I may have enjoyed it more.  But I was so busy trying to put a good solid well-crafted mystery story on top, I was pissed off when I learned what actually happened.

My friends, who enjoyed the story for what it was, had more fun that I did. 

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Conclusion

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If you look at Murder At Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Bladed Knife as a story that unwraps, then maybe you’ll enjoy it for what it us.  Given how much work there is to go through all the paperwork, I was very frustrated with the lack of clues,  lack of evidence, lack of explanations of rules of Magic, and the Deux Ex Machina final solution.

But I was definitely the outlier here: my friends enjoyed the story and had fun.  I didn’t.

A Review of Cyberpunk Unfolds: a Cooperative Escape Room

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Cyberpunk Unfolds is a pop-up Escape Room that was on Kickstarter back in December 2023 and delivered sometime in the later 2024.  It promised delivery in January 2024, so it was a number of months late.  We were very excited to get this, as it was #10 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

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I think we were SO EXCITED for this Cyberpunk Unfolds because it was another Pop-Up Escape Room game!   We had good luck with Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor (see above and below), so we were excited to get another Pop-Up Adventure!  A Pop-Up Adventure!  

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Granted, the Cyberpunk Unfolds is a smaller scope than Doomensions, but it still looked cool.

Let’s take a look!  There’s some minor spoilers on the content below (pictures of the game), but it shouldn’t affect gameplay at all if you don’t look too closely.

Jumping In

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So, Charlie and Allison are my Escape Room buddies: we have played a lot of Escape Rooms board games together (Unlock, Exit, etc)! See above.

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It might seem obvious from the cyber theme, but this escape room requires a phone or an iPad. In fact, you need to scan a QR code to even start the game (see above).

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After clumsily trying my phone for a few minutes, we reverted to Charlie’s iPad (see above). 

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If you play this, get an iPad to play so everyone can see the screen (it’s a bunch of web sites, not an app to download). See above.

Gameplay

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The gameplay was a little unexpected, as you interact with some people in Cyberspace almost like a text adventure game!  You type in responses, almost like you are playing an old Zork adventure game.  See above!

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As we played, we were directed by little videos showing us how to open up the Escape Room and get to the next scene.  There were a few struggles at the beginning, but it was nice that they actually showed a video showing EXACTLY how to unfold things.  

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Over the course of 1 night, about 1.5 hours, we proceeded through the Escape Room: we’d solve puzzles based on the current scene and enter the solutions into the “chat” with VIN, which would move us to the next scene.

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By the end of the night, we ended up just opening up the puzzle so everyone could see it.  It was “cool” that there were scenes that were 3D, but they actually got in the way of everyone seeing the scene!  To make it so everyone could stay involved, we just flattened the scene on the table later in the game. See above as we flatten one of the last puzzles.

This is an Escape Room: you solves puzzles based on the current scene and move to the next scene.  We don’t want to show too much more for fear of revealing too much.

Reactions

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The 3D puzzles and scenes were pretty cool, and we made some cool stuff.

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But, in the end, we actually didn’t like this very much. The quote of the night came from Charlie: “There were a lot of awkward points during the game”.  Some of the puzzles were awkward and unclear, some of the directions for moving forward were awkward and unclear, and some of the time was spent just awkwardly trying stuff. 

There were many times were we would say “Really? That’s the solution?”  

You might say “well, you guys are just stupid“.  Sure.   But we’ve played a lot of Escape Rooms together, so I think we have a sense of what works and what doesn’t.  Caveat Emptor.

Conclusion

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Let’s be clear; Cyberpunk Unfolds is very playable; there is a help system (so we didn’t get stuck completely), there are some cool puzzles and there are some cool moments.   But, none of my friends (not myself) really liked this experience.  

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There are directions for “resetting the game” … which we chose not to take.  We couldn’t see passing this onto another group of friends (see above).

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This is not a bad game, it just wasn’t for us.  Because it is playable, has a good hint system, and contains some cool moments, we’ll give it a 5.5/10.  Maybe you’ll enjoy this more than we did, but we struggled with a lot of points of awkwardness in the game.