{"id":7748,"date":"2019-07-19T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2019-07-19T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=7748"},"modified":"2019-07-18T10:54:22","modified_gmt":"2019-07-18T14:54:22","slug":"exit-the-catacombs-of-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/19\/exit-the-catacombs-of-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"Exit: The Catacombs of Horror."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a huge fan of the Exit games since I first tried & reviewed them<\/a> a year and a half ago. The series, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017, comprises a series of single-play games that mimic the experience of an escape room, asking you (solo or in a team) to find a series of codes to solve the puzzle, generally destroying the game’s components as you go. They’re fun, appropriately difficult, usually playable inside of an hour, and come with a structured system of hints in case you get stuck. My daughter and I do these as a rainy-day activity, and I think we’ve played at least five so far, enjoying most of them.<\/p>\n

The series steps up in difficulty with its newest title, Exit: The Catacombs of Horror<\/a>, a longer title playable over two sessions, with puzzles that promise to be harder to solve \u2026 which is true, because this game was almost certainly not playtested, with puzzles that are far less straightforward than those in previous titles. The puzzle you have to solve to finish the game is a joke \u2013 even after reading the third hint card, which is supposed to explain the solution, I still have no idea what the designers expected players to do. There’s a huge failure of design here: You don’t make puzzles more difficult by making them too obscure to solve.<\/p>\n

Exit’s puzzles come in all sorts of forms, but there are some common types, from deciphering codes in texts, finding hidden characters or images in printed materials, cutting and\/or folding the materials to reveal patterns, or finding images that look like numbers. All of the game’s codes comprise three digits, so you know that will always be your goal; you use a decoder disk, entering the three digits under the symbol for the puzzle you’re solving, and you get a number for a card in the answer deck, which tells you if you’re wrong or refers you to the next clue. These puzzles generally range from very direct to a bit weird, often when the game wants you to see a number in an image or in something you’ve drawn; they take an especially liberal view when it comes to visual representations of numbers in sketches or lines.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Catacombs of Horror, however, increases the difficulty by making things harder to see or to follow. One puzzle requires cutting images out of one of the cards, but the dashed lines that would tip you off that the designers want you to cut are almost impossible to see; my vision is fine, and I had a hard time spotting the lines, so I can’t imagine how hard it would be for older players or anyone requiring glasses. Another required finding blue dots on a large poster, except one of the blue dots was located on a teal flashlight, so the colors were nearly identical. There’s a puzzle that requires assembling a little cardboard box and threading a string through it, then looking through cutouts in the box’s sides and deciphering the number shown by the strings, once they’re pulled taut, which was a complete flop \u2013 yeah, I get why they said that looks like the number 2, but no average person is going to get that. It’s too inside-boardgaming for me, and I say that as someone who’s played most of the titles in the series.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the final puzzle, which I won’t spoil because I can’t. I still don’t really get what the designers wanted me to do, even after a detailed reading of the last card \u2013 and my daughter, who loves these games but had lost interest before we finished this one, didn’t understand it either. It involves a lit candle, a ‘column’ with arrows that you place in a little plastic stand (which didn’t work \u2013 the column was way too flimsy and narrow for the stand), and then \u2026 a shadow? It’s the only time we’ve played an Exit game and given up. There’s no way they tested this final puzzle with regular game players, and I feel like the English translation of the last hint card (the third \u2013 each riddle has three hint cards, the first just a guide to start you, the third the solution) was inadequate.<\/p>\n

I’m still interested in the series \u2013 there are four other new titles this year, and I see at least three previous titles we haven’t tried yet \u2013 but I can’t recommend The Catacombs of Horror unless they revise it, especially the final riddle. If you’d like to try the Exit games, I suggest The Abandoned Cabin<\/a>, The Pharaoh’s Tomb<\/a>, or The Secret Lab<\/a> as a starting point \u2013 and feel free to ask me questions in the comments if you get a little stuck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a huge fan of the Exit games since I first tried & reviewed them a year and a half ago. The series, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017, comprises a series of single-play games that mimic the experience of an escape room, asking you (solo or in a team) to find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[582,581,1057],"class_list":["post-7748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-board-games","tag-cooperative-games","tag-puzzle-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7750,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748\/revisions\/7750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}