Review: Welcome to Funland

RATING: 1 Key RESULT: Win REMAINING: +5:51

The last time there was a park this terrible, some bitch fed her husband to a tiger.

Scenic

The amusement park was on the edge of town, right next to the woods. Half the attractions were posted OUT OF ORDER and the other half should have been. You remember coming here as a kid, and you remember it closing after a little girl disappeared. All they ever found was one red ribbon in the woods. The park reopened a few years later but it might as well have stayed shut. Hardly anybody went there anymore.

The show is headed by a creepy clown called Happy Jack. So far it’s been creepy, but all in fun. That suddenly changes when Happy Jack is staring you straight in the face. He starts laughing loudly, and he’s playing with a large knife. He smiles and says, “How dare you make fun of my show? Your laughter ends tonight!”

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.

Spin Master’s product is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of print qualities. Some larger graphics and maps are produced in grand scale on thick, high gloss durable papers. Many other elements in each round are thinner paper and tear easily. Some of those items will be damaged through the course of normal play, but thankfully links are available to print your own replacements.

As a recommended companion, Spin Master does offer an official companion app. In it, custom background music loops are available to play during your experience, adding a warped carnival tone to help bring Welcome to Funland to life. The app also offers an appropriately themed photo frame for the game. Getting the perfect team photo might be a bit frustrating, as you’ll find the end result does not match the app’s live preview. For some reason, our pictures reversed every single time we saved one – even though it showed correctly within the app.

Scenic

As an expansion pack, Welcome to Funland requires the separate purchase of Spin Master’s original Escape Room: The Game product. From there, circus-goers will borrow its functioning game timer, called the Chrono Decoder. It doubles as several different cipher keys you’ll need throughout the games, which felt a bit clunky and awkward at times. During game play, to unlock “rooms” (again, sealed envelopes holding your next location and puzzles) you’ll insert four different plastic keys – aligned in the correct order – into the physical game clock itself. Get it right and be rewarded with a chime; but if you’re wrong, you’ll be chastised by a buzzer sound effect.

This adds an interesting sense of technology to the Spin Master box – but the unfortunate truth is that we have had more than one occasion across the Spin Master suite of products where our game clock malfunctioned, denying correct answer combinations repeatedly. To make matters worse, each wrong answer physically takes time off your clock – a move intended on paper to discourage brute forcing the codes, but in practice during a clearly broken game only serves to even further frustrate its players.

Each task requires park goers to decipher a four digit code, which could be comprised of any combination of letters, numbers, shapes or directions. Individual puzzles will each lead to one of the four positions of a level’s code, and can be solved in any order making for a fairly non-linear gameplay experience suitable for slightly larger groups.

Happy Jack’s challenge begins logically enough, with four tasks required to free captives from his cage. Three of those tasks gave us hope that Funland could be, well, fun – but the fourth – a most convoluted equation which is equal parts math and logic leaps, set the stage for what was to come. From there, puzzles are strung together in a way that no one is likely to ever intuitively connect them, creating the foundation for a proverbial house of cards of frustration. Welcome to Funland is illogical puzzle plus illogical puzzle plus illogical puzzle – which, we suppose, is an appropriate lead in to yet another frustrating mathematical equation clown-painted as “a puzzle.”

From a hint perspective, Spin Master provides scrambled hint cards that – when slipped inside a red decoder sleeve will become readable. We found these hints to be sufficient when present – but it’s important to know each game has a limited number of them, and not all puzzles will necessarily have a hint. This can become much more frustrating to deal with than the online or in-app hint systems many other brands offer, resulting in additional unneeded frustration from the Spin Master product. (There are official walk-throughs available on the Escape Room: The Game website, however, these offer only the direct answers and thus, are not recommended for hint purposes.)

Overall

There is a general rule that Spin Master’s Escape Room: The Game titles are consistently among the most frustrating and least fun options on the market. Welcome to Funland continues that most unwelcoming trend.

Early on, Escape Room: The Game taught us that not all at home options are created equal, quickly sending Spin Master as a brand to the bottom of our preference list. Through multiple stand alone expansion packs, as well as multiple sequel boxes, Escape Room: The Game has been a nearly consistent disappointment full of frustration thanks to its inexcusably illogical gameflow.

We were cautiously optimistic that Welcome to Funland, which combines two of our favorite themes – amusement parks and evil clowns – could be an exception to that rule, but it doesn’t even come close. At the end of the day, the game sums itself up best by saying “Happy Jack wants to do bad things, very bad things.”

Happy Jack made this game.