Review: The House of Riddles

RATING: 2 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 17:07

But we don’t even like cherry pie.

Thames & Kosmos follows a consistently formulaic path through all of their escape game titles. As such, you’ll notice throughout the span of our reviews for various Exit: The Game titles, certain segments may carry over, simply because it defines the big picture information about this product line as a whole. Each review will, however, continue to include unique, game specific information.

Story

After a long trip through lonely roads and dark woods, you have finally arrived. With a queasy feeling but full of anticipation, you climb the stairs to the mysterious “House of Riddles.” What on earth awaits? Hard to believe you will soon be face to face with three actual detectives – Sandra, Mario and Tom!

The three detectives have invited you to a mysterious meeting. All you know is that they have designed their own escape rooms – rooms filled with riddles that have to be solved in order to find the exit. Along with the invitation, the three detectives sent you a strange disk, with the following words written on it: “Decoder disk – to help you solve numeric codes.”

The windows of the house gaze at you like creepy, diabolically shining eyes. Not a soul in sight. A little hesitantly but burning with curiosity, you open the heavy front door and enter the dark entry hall. With a loud crash, the door slams shut behind you. A muffled click removes all doubt – you are locked in!

Like all Exit: The Game offerings, the story has little to do with what actually occurs throughout the course of the game beyond lightly themed graphical materials. In The House of Riddles, the narrative essentially consists of “Three people you don’t know set up an escape room in a stranger’s house.” But they’re detectives you guys, so it’s probably ok.

Consistent across all Exit: The Game titles, expect a lot of really dry reading, full of narrative that frankly is neither interesting nor compelling. It’s just words for the sake of having words, all while the clock continues to tick away during the course of gameplay.

We realize none of this sounds very fun – but if you just suck it up and get through the House of Riddles, you’ll get pie. If you bake it yourself. Because escape game.

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’ve 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, while also carrying similar dimensions of 3.5″ x 2.25″ in size. Each Exit: The Game edition also includes a themed booklet spanning multiple pages that connects with tasks identified on the cards. A 4.5″ 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 The House of Riddles, the strange items are a small blue ball, a would-be magnifying glass made of carboard and a mask card.

Each game’s respective page within the Kosmo 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.

Puzzles

Progressing through an Exit: The Game scenario will lead players on a primarily card-based gameplay adventure to match a three digit number with a unique shape, which must then be entered into an included decoder wheel. If correct, this will indicate the next card(s) to draw from the deck. Where things get tedious, however, is that each answer will lead you to a card which then directs you to verify your solution and draw yet another card. This unnecessary double-step quickly becomes tiresome throughout the course of gameplay.

Each Exit: The Game title has the option of being run through the Kosmos Games Helper App, free in the Apple iTunes and Google Play stores. Through it, you’ll be able to manage time limits and listen along to themed background music that helps bring the storyworld of each game to life. In general, this is the least inclusive home game app we’ve encountered.

The House of Riddles – when it works – has a flow that’s largely more satisfying than other Thames and Kosmos titles – but, when it doesn’t work, it’s more illogical than most home games. Some tasks are clever enough, and more importantly, intuitive – like rearranging a bookshelf or physically acting out a code. Others meet in the middle, like a magnifying glass that basically comes with step by step instructions, rather than allowing detectives the chance to solve it. But then there’s the other extreme.

A game of billiards creates a clever mechanic, but one we’d suggest no player is likely to logically connect without being explicitly told to do so with a hint. And how often do you find yourself leaving a game to retrieve an item from your home’s kitchen? If your answer was zero, that’s about to change. And you’d better hope you just happen to own the item they assume is in one of your cupboards. It may be the strangest version of prior knowledge we’ve ever seen.

But perhaps worst of all, Exit: The Game products have a nasty habit of hiding clues and codes outside of the game itself, in places like the retail packaging, under cardboard dividers within the box, in the instruction manuals and yes, even the SKU number on the items bar code. Not only does this present an illogical and irrational expectation that players are to connect, but it instantly kills what little storyworld an Exit: The Game title has managed to build up to that point, breaking the fourth wall for, well, absolutely no reason or benefit what so ever Overall

The House of Riddles is one of more than a dozen escape room home activities available for sale under the “Exit: The Game” branding from Thames & Kosmos. Unlike other home games, these are each individually packaged, and thus carry a relatively lower price point. We’d suggest, however, that in the case of Exit: The Game, this is generally a matter of “you get what you pay for.”

We’ve played nearly every Exit: The Game box released to this point, and simply put, they’re rarely even remotely enjoyable. Instead, players can expect to find a box typically stacked from top to bottom with one logic leap after another, leading to a most frustrating hour ahead.

A great escape game brings to life the mantra, “time flies when you’re having fun.” For us, Exit: The Game has often been quite the opposite. An hour or a bit more playing one of these home games often feels like an eternity. They’re dry, oftentimes tedious and rarely, if ever, include any of those clever “ah ha!” moments we long for in an escape game. Even worse, the majority of Thames & Kosmos’ titles are riddled with more logic leaps than, well, riddles themselves.

And even with every moment of contention that stands out as the tipping point for The House of Riddles, our take-away is the inexplicable, um, prize (?) upon solving its final puzzle? In what seems at first glance like the set up to a bonus puzzle or some sort of cliff-hanger, new investigators quite literally receive a blank “detective identification” card (upon which they’re instructed to write their name) – and a cooking recipe for cherry pie. After staring at them each for several minutes, we were shocked to process the reality of the situation before us: Thames & Kosmos expected us to put the fake detective ID in our wallets and go (back) to the kitchen to bake our own cherry pie. Because escape room.