#puzzlepostin

You play as a detective specializing in behavioral profiling, and Cynthia Grimm reaches out to you to invite you to her fairytale masquerade to figure out the identity of the mysterious Piper; everyone has a role at this ball, but the Pied Piper has sent our host multiple letters demanding Cynthia's resignation from the family company, or else the Piper will have his revenge. Step down, or see the Piper ruin the family name Cynthia has worked so hard to improve.

This game starts strong on its themes, and rides the line between ridiculousness, intrigue, and downright fun pretty deftly.

Each of the guests has a character, after all, and they're all committed. Minus, I suppose, the Big Bad Wolf real estate agent, whose zipper has gotten stuck and begs your help in freeing him from furrydom.

Alright and full disclaimer - I left the review sitting at this point for like, two weeks and am now typing it up before we sit down for our next game tomorrow, so details might be more sparse aha.

Alright so yeah, we had the Wolf of Wall Street, and Goldilocks - who wanted three extremely specific appetizers from the spread and they had to be jusssstt right.

It was… honestly really charming. It was fun! It was funny! The ridiculous balance was really pleasing, and imagining our group all crowded around, squinting suspiciously at trays of appetizers trying to decide if green olives would be fine or not and you know. Of course Goldilocks would be picky. You kind of gotta respect the level of character performance going on at this masquerade; it really helped carry, too, just how out there the NPCs in this game are. It's nutty, but it's all wrapped in fairy tale ball trappings, so it works.

Everyone here just really likes LARPing.

But I think the funniest thing was that… there was a Rumplestilkskin LARPer, right? And his whole thing was guessing what the guy's actual name was, and he had this big list of clues so you could puzzle it out and I think… the next milisecond after we finished reading it, one of our group just. Immediately solved it.

Absolute props to them, it would have taken the rest of us much longer, but it was just so funny to have your fae trickster just barely finish his shpeal when it's immediately popped. I'd lose my shit. I did lose my shit. RIP to that guy.

There was also a fun little logic puzzle of a character who told a ton of lies, but had a lot of rules about how and when he'd lie, and untangling the big list of statements he made to pick out the Hot Family Gossip was enjoyable!

I think I'm forgetting one, maybe, but another little change from the usual format in this one I enjoyed was that we actually didn't have a suspect list at the start? We had to ask around the party and gain our list that way, and that was fun! I liked it. Reasons to be chasing after these folks, or giving them more scrutiny.

This half of the game was looking at your gained suspect list and trying to match them to the behavioral profile your detective has made of the Pied Piper, using various observations and little tricks to discretely take their measures. And I think this is the weaker half of the game, really; sometimes suspects get eliminated for really kind of flimsy reasons, or they expect you to move forward with elimination even outside of puzzle time, which makes sense once you step back, but in the moment, DBMS games are so reliant on Puzzle, it almost feels like breaking the rules kicking someone out of the lineup if a puzzle doesn't explicitly tell you so.

I think, actually, I'll leave it at that.

Mystery at the Fairytale Ball was definitely one of the stronger Deadbolt games. A fun romp, and if you want to give one of their games a spin, I think this would be a good one to do so with.

Ok - Ghost in the Machine is set in Victorian era London and you really feel it. The language and setting just ooze attention to detail and just how people would have been; they took their time period and, so far, are really excellently utilizing just what might make a mystery set in this particular era intriguing. The dangers of poisons becoming more widely known, the clash of unions vs the rise of industrial danger, strands of the occult swirling at the edges in a very delicious way.

Like damn. Folks getting eaten by the giant cotton gin and you're telling me Hastur might be here, too?

Fuck ahahaha.

To be fair, I don't *think* this is going to be eldritch, but the writing in this just. Is wonderfully evocative.

It's extremely textually dense; it's my first MPC game at all, and being one of their Post Mortem series, I think they bend more towards logic and finding clues in all the text than the more gamified setup you see in Deadbolt, particularly. Most of the gameplay is actually set up in a choose your own adventure book type format, where you chase down leads as numbers and flip through a book, taking many, many notes to keep all your discoveries straight. I'm sure it's a format others have done, but it's a real joy to encounter. The system of converting dates and character introduction leads into ways you can find more information is just so deliciously fun. And when they tease you, holding a character's name out of reach so you can't dig into them *yet*.

Such fun.

It felt so rewarding to chase the logical progression of clues and timelines we'd been given and to have it actually pan out. It wasn't disappointing to guess; it was intensely satisfying to say, hear a pair of death dates in the last year and go oh. I bet they both worked at the Mill, and their deaths are what radicalized this man to join the side of the Union - and to be right! Could have popped bottles in delight.

And the Mill itself is... ah, man, I just genuinely adore this company's prose. It's so reverent and atmospheric without dragging down the pace or lingering too long in exposition. The main character's perspective is charming, it's fun, while also feeling like a detective who has done this for a while and seen a lot.

We had a bit of a misstep speed bump today, but honestly? I'm not even that bothered now. It got frustrating in the moment once we ran out of all possible leads to take, not realizing we'd missed a path, but the paths we chased down while we were lost still gave us a lot of information and gave more depth to the world that I'm really eager to put to use, or to see the story put to use.

My formatting is being a bit picky on here tonight so I won't ramble too long, but I am completely enamored. I wanted their Hastur mystery before this; now I am consumed with the need to play it some day ahahaha.

Arguably, Ghost in the Machine is not eldritch.

But *damn* has it flirted with it in the tone and descriptions so exquisitely, I think they'd just absolutely kill going full eldritch madness.

I found the format on this one delightful; it encouraged a very escape room typical 60 minute time limit, and with that in mind, the flow of it was very alike an escape room. It felt breakneck quick, like my character was sprinting through the train, snatching up notes, and sprinting off to the next car after glancing at the puzzle. Each page is printed one-sided, and the instructions guide you to peek at the car numbers (printed diagonally so you can really just get a good little peek before smoothing it back down) and then to write the number on the back.

You then have a puzzle on each page, usually nothing huge but a good little teaser, which you'll use the answer from to find which car number to head to next (flipping over that page). The story is told exclusively through notes left for you from your friend as you sort of off screen investigate the train; the puzzles are themed to each car, yes, but it was very compact. The pacing felt blistering!

I was quite surprised when I did stall (I miscounted some things, counted the wrong things... woops) that 45 minutes had already passed! It's worth mentioning I also kind of had to cheese/skip one puzzle in the middle; my printer only does black and white, you see, and that puzzle required color. I had a feeling glancing at the map that it would, so I made my guess about which car and it turned out to be right. Fortunately I didn't have too many cars left by then, so I didn't have to gingerly turn over a lot of pages.

I'll also mention that this entire game was a single pdf, which was very efficient. The creator took a very simple path to including the hints inside the pdf; they're on the final page of the pdf, yes, printed out, but the text is italicized in a mirrored font, so for me at least, it kept me from spoiling myself while checking a hint to make sure my thinking was on path. The instructions advise using a mirror and blocking out stuff you don't want to see with a paper, which might be easier to parse for sure, but I think stumbling through the backwards reading helped keep me humble (and made sure I wouldn't have to worry about accidental puzzle spoilers. My backwards reading isn't *that* good ahahaha.

Ahh, yeah! I really only hit a couple small snags in this one, but they were fun to find and figure out. Quick, enjoyable, a very pleasant romp :)

I really liked the way they've formatted this one, I won't lie. The pages for each car, the efficient presentation. They've set up a google form page to use for final password verification, which was a delight to see! That's an approachable option! It sort of spoils things; once you have the first letter, you definitely know the answer, but it *is* an option for verification systems. Really slick and streamlined. Not super ornate or in depth; the story is entirely told and not shown or intuited, but it *felt* very alike to an escape room.