RATING: 1 Key RESULT: Win REMAINING: 5:59
“The ancient Egyptians and chocolate ice cream were always my greatest passions.” – authentic text inscribed by the questionable Pharaoh Kosmos, perfectly summing up the logic to be found within this burial chamber.
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.
You are traveling with a tour group in Egypt. Your visit to the Valley of the Kings is the highlight of your vacation. You find the tomb of Tutankhamun especially spellbinding. Inside, you notice that you have lost the rest of the group. As you wander through the passageways, your fascination gradually turns to panic. Suddenly, you find yourselves in a mysterious burial chamber and you hear a frightening sound. The stone door closes behind you, blocking your escape. As you look around, you discover a dust-covered notebook and an ancient disk. The entire tomb seems covered with riddles. You will only be able to escape if you manage to solve all the riddles in time. If not, you will be buried under stone forever…
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 Pharaoh’s Tomb, the narrative essentially consists of “The sarcophagus opened! Inside it, you find two Riddle cards!” Because you know, Egyptology.
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 remain uncertain how solving convoluted riddles aided our escape from The Pharaoh’s Tomb, but to be fair, we also solved very few of those riddles without significant amounts of hints.
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 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″ cardostock 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 Pharaoh’s Tomb, the strange items are simply red and green strips of paper. (It’s Egyptian minimalist chic at its finest.)
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.
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.
It’s fair to expect large amounts of frustration to be waiting inside an Exit: The Game box, but even lifting the lid fully prepared, The Pharaoh’s Tomb annoyed us to a noteworthy degree. This may just be Thames & Kosmo’s worst escape home game to date.
As we mentioned in all Exit: The Game titles, every single step leads Egyptoligists to a three digit number – a predictable trope made all the more tedious in The Pharaoh’s Tomb by requiring each numbers translation into hieroglyphics. By the finale puzzle, this mechanic had more than worn out its welcome. (Honestly, by the second puzzle it was already well on its way.)
Barely ten minutes into the game, we found ourselves just having no idea what we were supposed to be doing. The Pharaoh’s Tomb feels more disjointed than the average Exit: The Game title. There was even one point where we correctly solved a puzzle, but still didn’t have a “location” to match it to on the wheel, and thus, could do nothing with that accurate code. The Pharaoh’s Tomb feels so broken by design that we found ourselves unable to even ask the “what would a bad designer think is clever” in order to try to proceed at times.
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. The Pharaoh’s Tomb fell through this game flow trap door more times than any other Exit: The Game title – and frankly, did so in far more illogical, unintuitive, rage-inducing ways than we’d ever seen.
The Pharaoh’s Tomb 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, The Pharaoh’s Tomb might just be the worst of them all. Opening the box fully prepared to tackle the consistent general rule that these Thames & Kosmos products are typically stacked from top to bottom with one logic leap after another, The Pharaoh’s Tomb stood out significantly as the most frustrating.
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.
Case in point: we just went an entire Egyptian-flavored game review without making a single crack about how cliché the theme is. That’s how bad this one is.
*Montu, Escape Authority’s VP, Dog Business™ and lead home game correspondent endorses the opinions found within this review.
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Venue: Thames & Kosmos
Location: At Home Game
Number of Games: 16 (1 in this box.)
GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:
Duration: 60-120 minutes
Capacity: 1-4 people
Group Type: Private / You will not be paired with strangers (but if you are, call 911 immediately to report a home invasion.)
Cost (at Publish Time): $10.99 + shipping (Target.com)