#moonsummit

I believe last time I mentioned that some of the box conclusions felt a bit easy. The story tasks a bit thin, especially if you consider that folks would have been waiting a month between installments on release.

Episode 4 I think exemplified this.

There is very little in this box that really tells you anything new. The purpose of it is to eliminate another suspect, and you get more insight into Emma via one of her journal pages, and Lillian by one of hers, but you really don't learn anything you didn't already know aha.

We did learn one thing at this point.

The prop in this box is Toby's wallet. I'd said last time that they felt more like fluff than evidence to further your mystery, and this one finally made me question that. Because I did a very normal thing and opened up the wallet to find the little slip of paper in there luring Toby to what would be his murder site. This was delightful. I'd wanted the physical props to be relevant, and one was at last!

I wouldn't notice until later, when we were wrapping up the final box, that we'd missed a couple clues hidden in/on the earlier box items.

Really, who puts a password on the inner tag of a beanie? I guess I'm glad it wasn't crucial information hidden behind it, but I'm a bit miffed on principle that it wasn't more important ahaha. We completely missed an entire fork of the story and it didn't even matter, and I'm not sure how to feel about that when the writing overall was so fun?

I will also confess that it took a couple more boxes with encoded messages in footprints to realize it was morse code. Looking now at the box materials to refresh myself as I work on this, you get a clue with this episode 4 journal page who those notes are between. Rusty fills in his hare tracks; Emma doesn't. You can find some doodled on her journal page. I just didn't connect the literal dots until much later. I also just now while re-examining one of the encoded Morse notes just realized it had E Clarkson on the luggage tag, so another clue as to who it involved.

Gotta give Hunt a Killer their due; that's pretty damn nice attention to detail, and makes a good connection.

I just wish it had pinged as morse code to me earlier! I think in future boxes, this will have me primed to look for those possible patterns, I just feel a bit sad that we missed on the context for those.

In my defense, I did actually have all three of those morse code notes in hand at one point and went hm. I think these are morse code, actually, and we can solve them? But then when I went to a morse code solver, it seemed like garbage. I just decoded one of them, actually, the one from episode 4 as I did this because I figured I should get that context even if the box is long ended, and it was quite hard to get the spacing right! The spacing is a bit ambiguous, leaving the message a bit finicky to decode, so I suppose I have to give my frustrated self earlier in the day a break.

Let's see - episode 4 ends with eliminating a suspect. Very easily, might I add? All the papers and such are really extraneous, you really only need to do one very brief thing to complete this box.

It felt like a very sudden and easily earned end to the episode, so we headed on in to episode 5.

This is another suspect elimination, and… yes, checking it now, we felt a little let down by this part, too.

I guessed off the cuff that this one would be exonerating Lillian, and I was right! It was another very simple elimination, based off her photo taken and the sound of rushing water very shortly before Toby would have been getting killed (30+ minutes away) (and honestly, while not intended, her clumsy walking on an easy trail there also helped prove that she was not gonna be able to sprint her ass across the park to kill a man after the photo ahaha), and the rest of the box contents served to clarify that yes, as we knew, Toby was not careless. Yes, Emma is an ecofascist, and also very emotionally volatile. Yes, Conrad brought alcohol along, even though it was banned from the supplies.

Good things to know, but things we already knew! It felt like it actually tipped Emma over from plausibly sus to definitely the red herring.

I was pleased that we got to refer back to our map from episode… 2? But it was so short, ah. I wish we could have played with it more! It was such a lovely prop. I said it before and I'll say it again, Hunt a Killer does a fabulous job with their papers! The varying textures, sizes, it's a great attention to detail to make believable papers and files that are satisfying to rifle through as a player.

Episode 6.

Our final installment.

This was when I first made my confused connection that the notes I'd been setting aside were all morse code, but solving it was bungled by my own struggles with interpreting where to begin and letter spacing </3

I am a little conflicted about episode 6!

We got Conrad's journal, at last, and got to do a few tasty cipher solves in a row (substitutions). It was satisfying to finally get to do the puzzlin' we'd craved, but also a bit unsurprising what we uncovered in there. Who could have guessed, academic fraud?

And with that, the case was over, but we had all these loose ends we'd been unable to figure our way into.

Conrad's journal had its ciphers, but we still had that earlier postcard whose cipher we'd never made progress on, so that we were able to finish the mystery without it… it felt oddly hollow? Undeserved. Those and the morse code.

I've gone ahead and done all the morse code now, here, and I do have to say, I think they must have gotten feedback about the legibility of the spacing because the note in the final box was much easier to input aha. But gosh, even now, with that extra flavor… it was still stuff we knew.

Emma's alibi was always a tissue in the breeze, with Rusty not mentioning her coming with him to reset the trap. This just confirms it, you know?

So, once we'd run out of paths we could find to follow, we ended up looking up just what the postcard cipher was, since we'd managed to figure out during journal that this was a third cipher encoding, but what was it for? We'd never needed it, and as we found out in the video explanation, cracking it was pretty involved and crazy.

And it turned out, we'd never found the stuff it was used for. Way back in the episodes, you get the hint that you'll get into Ricci's university account, but it never seemed to follow through. Remember those props whose diagetic-ness I doubted?

Well, turns out, Ricci wrote his password on the inside tag of his beanie, and since I'd never investigated the beanie that closely, we just. Didn't have any of the information inside that section.

Hidden behind a crazy cipher, locked behind a password, and it's just extra fluff information to give you Conrad's suspicions/potential motive early on.

I'm really not sure how to feel about this!

Of the games I have played recently, Moon Summit certainly tops the list.

The logic flows well, the story is engaging, theorizing really went crazy in the first three episodes. Ironically, once we began eliminating more suspects, it got flatter. I'm also just not sure, design-wise, that it's good design to make those ciphers and codes and have the information behind them be unneeded. Why even bother with it, then?

I'm not sure if the information being non-critical or the postcard cipher being crazy obtuse enabled one or the other, but it felt Not Good!

I suppose on one hand it means you won't get stopped dead if you can't decode morse code, but on the other, it's kind of sad that this work went into things players can entirely miss. And - it's supposed to be a mystery to solve! I suppose we did, but god damn it, realism is all well and good and god knows after the improbable ghost of my other weekend game I appreciated something quite grounded, but I would've accepted the bear scratching a puzzle in the bark to get a password!

There's a balance to find between the absurdity inherent in solve puzzles to find the murderer games, where you're walking a line between gameplay and the detective genre and trying to satisfy both. You want the logic to flow, you want a believable conclusion that feels earned. But just rifling through papers might not be satisfying enough, even if those papers are lusciously textured. I want to dig a little more than the scant files possible to put in a mystery box might allow without putting a puzzle in my way.

But also, it requires a suspension of disbelief doesn't it?

Would this serious researcher leave his cipher code laying around, if he wasn't a man with 30 years of lies behind him? If you're trying to hide your dalliance, you probably don't want to clue your coworkers in to your morse code scribblings.

Hell, Emma got into Toby's laptop because he conveniently scribbled the password into his journal's edges.

People are nosy, and people who are isolated and don't like you? Even more so.

I'm not sure how better to really balance the push and pull of genre and game expectations here, but I will say for sure that Moon Summit was fun.

It told a satisfying, believable tale, and the early theorizing really showed their best writing. The hooks, the intrigue were expertly woven, and I am, overall, glad to have played this game. I think the things we stumbled over will be good experience for future games!

Episode 1 was as expected; this is your intro point. You begin with the autopsy report, incident reports, a couple of evidence bags and a photo of the body - along with, of course, your introductory profiles of the characters involved.

I actually really love the in-universe article/university pamphlet used for this, with its pre-expedition interviews and general university hype about such an anticipated project. I think it's a really good use of props in an immersive, realistic way to lay out our main characters, give us a bite of who they are and what they do, a little sliver of what their business is, and it feels very natural and real.

I love props, I love these little extra flourishes. I love the quality of Hunt A Killer's paper materials*; the letters from the detective and the client are good, stiff, sturdy paper, which fits something you're likely to pass around, and I like the case folders and their little tabs. Maybe they do this format all the time in their big cases like this, but Moon Summit is my first of their large, episodic cases, so I guess I'll have to see when I snag another!

(I'll circle back to the evidence bags in the end, I think.)

The bulk of episode 1 is reports. There's a lot of reading and sifting in this section, and I really enjoy the work it does to establish our case knowledge. It lays out the incident, as it was reported from the perspectives of our cast and the rangers who arrived to search for Toby. The facts we will spend the rest of the chapters unraveling, beginning with our goal for this box; if a bear didn't kill him, what did?

It was a delight picking through the autopsy report to pluck out the overlooked. The inconsistent! Who hasn't used a little bear mauling to hide their wrongdoings?

And I will add, here, that the online portal/fake in-universe website for the detective agency is quite charming. The mini desktop layout and its adaptability have me wanting to know how they set it up - is the password an embedded flag to activate more files? Hm hm, I wish I knew more about website coding! - and the playlist? Short, but charming as a detail. While I already had some (admittedly, ill-fitting jazz) music on for our background as we sleuthed, it's accompanying me now as I write.

The in-universe website also has some evidence, provided by your 'client,' which updates with each part of the story you unlock, as I mentioned above. It also has a glossary of sorts to help with all the medical/anatomical terms given in the autopsy. When we read through that, we hadn't gone to the website yet, but it was nice to skim this page afterwards and straighten things out a little bit more.

We think we probably dug maybe a little too deep into all the text in episode 1, but it was great fun to have all of that to sink our teeth into! Recent similar type games we've played have been more puzzle heavy/gamey, while this one, so far as we have gotten, feels more like logic and piecing together the evidence timeline and slotting facts in place to find the truth.

The bears aren't scratching puzzles into the bark. Not yet, at least.

We spent a good little intermission this afternoon between episodes 1 and 2 just going over the characters and story so far - how the characters spoke about Toby, how curious it was how each person accounted for themself while talking to the rangers. Is there really an eagle nest to the southeast? So conveniently the exact opposite direction they would need to go to find him?

Just why did Toby head out into the woods that night on his own, and what did the items found in the woods along the trails have to do with it, if anything?

The signal mirror.

Just to his northeast.

Did he go out to meet someone, without telling anyone else? Someone who may have signaled their meeting place to him in the twilight, murdered him, and dragged him to the known bear habitat to hide their actions?

This made for incredibly fun conversation as I chopped up the green beans and potatoes for dinner, and served as a fun little anticipation builder before we tucked in to the second part.

Episode 2.

A new episode, a new goal.

I mentioned earlier that I'm a sucker for a prop, and well. This one has a whole map! With trails and difficulty ratings for them, topographical lines, all of it. It really looked like something you'd pick up going to a state park, and it had me beaming with delight to see it. The trail descriptions, the names… it was just a bundle of details that really made the game feel more grounded, and I love that the effort went into designing it.

That it would be part of a puzzle was just a cherry on top, you know?

Anyway, we had our goal for this episode, along with the client nudging us to start thinking of the relationships between the expedition members. Not that we needed prompting on that part; we'd already seen enough in the first episode to feel the hook to keep going, and episode 2 added nicely to that. Just who are these people? Nigel, Conrad, Emma, Lillian, Rusty - what are they like, when they're not talking to a ranger? How do they treat those beneath them, what lays in their pasts?

Episode 2 gives us a tantalizing sliver of just about everyone, but what immediately stood out to us was - wow. None of these folks have anything kind to say about Toby. Except one. And wasn't that just a thread to tug at?

Ultimately, the map puzzle ended up being a bit different from what I expected. A lot simpler than I'd hoped, so it was perhaps a bit of a let down in execution there, but the result is satisfying. With more information, we can begin closing the gaps in the stories. With a more precise time of death, we can begin to eliminate suspects who simply would not have had the time to do such a thing - though eliminating a suspect won't come until episode 3.

For now, we know more or less where the murder happened. When. What it was done with. We know how the killer returned to camp, who would have been there, who wasn't. I'm sure as we move into Episode 4, we'll start punching more holes in the 'facts' we have right now, but that's really getting ahead of myself.

We jumped straight in to episode 3 and ohoho~.

The character dynamics are bubbling in this installment. As said above, episode 3 is when we finally eliminate a suspect.

Our files this time are packed with information and implication - along with really filling out a character who I'd noted at the end of episode 2 was flying suspiciously under the radar. And with more from our murder victim! We're still logic-heavy with no real puzzles by this point, but I've started seeing threads in this one and the last that I think we'll be pulling from for the upcoming boxes.

Not to mention, of course, the tantalizing cipher I am batting my paws against with such curiousity.

I don't think we can solve it yet.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe next time we sit down to work on the next episode, I'll pull out those pieces from chapter 3 and see if I can crack them.

But ah! Really, the character dynamics this time were a riot. The stars of this episode are the video evidence in the online portal; interviews done by Lillian, and wow are they revealing. Unsurprising for a murder game, but by golly, I don't think things were going very well in this isolated expedition!

My overall thoughts on this set so far are that it's delightful! We're having a great time. The variety of evidence and files to sift through makes it fun, helps make finding things feel satisfying. The writing is compelling, with good hooks to keep tugging you along with contradictions and details that make you want to dig your teeth into them and pull. The characters feel like presents we're teasing dirty secrets out of, and god, I feel like the Grinch smirking when one really shows their hand.

I do hope for some puzzles in the upcoming boxes, because it has been extremely light on the puzzlin' so far, but the flow has been good.

I do think, though, that this set does work best when you have the option of blasting through it all in one go. I feel like waiting a month between boxes might have been frustrating - especially when a couple of them, if we'd not insisted on digging into all the text we could get our hands on, we actually could have solved them very quickly, and they might have felt underwhelming with such a long wait between. Since you can only obtain this as a full set now, I guess it's not a problem, but felt worth mentioning!

I am a sucker for physical props, but I actually have a mild complaint about the physical 'evidence' props included so far in Moon Summit. Aside from the signal mirror included in episode 3, I'm not sure that these pieces of evidence are actually… evidence? They feel more like extras to justify the cost of a box that might be bare without them, with no narrative hooks I can really discern as of yet.

Which is a shame, because why the hell was there a bear claw found in the lab tent?!

*One complaint I have about Hunt a Killer, though not quite applicable so far with this set, is their story-critical non-paper props. I suppose the closest I have in this set so far is the envelopes; they cannot be resealed. It would have been easy to put them in envelopes with a little metal tab, perhaps a touch more expensive, but it would have preserved the experience a bit more for secondary plays. With the glue-sealed envelopes, it's certainly not the worst sin I've seen Hunt A Killer do, as it does not fundamentally make the game unplayable after the first play, but I do frown that it's a choice made. One could say, I guess, that at least it's easy to see if a set has been played yet, but I don't know. After Body on the Boardwalk's single use lock, I'm primed to notice these kinds of things that might alter experiences if obtained second-hand.

Alright, that big aside taken care of, gosh, I can't give like, a final rating or anything yet, but I am very charmed so far by Moon Summit. I'm gonna be turning over possibilities tonight as I settle in, and that's just lush.

After so many Deadbolt games, it's a real treat to dig into this big bear I've had tucked away on a shelf, and it's great to see a reminder of just why I fell so in love with this genre of game, and see just how differently they can be constructed.

I've got another review I need to type up from this weekend - for a Deadbolt mini game - but hopefully, we'll head back to Moon Summit next week, and maybe revisit another Deadbolt so I can write that one up too!