A Study in Intrigue

Having looked at the Museum of Intrigues website before the game I did wonder what we’d be playing as there seemed to be a vast game area with so many different themes installed in one area. Couple that with the short story of our game and I was most definitely intrigued.

Then when the zoom link arrived with all the usual additional information, there was a link to a google drive. I’m glad I peeked beforehand as there was a vast amount of information to take in, pictures, documents, and places for information to be entered. If you ever play this game then please do your homework!!

We joined our Holmes detective avatar and the game was most certainly afoot as we commenced the mission to find out who killed Dr. Carl Elwin and why. But it very quickly transpired that this won’t be as simple as finding the murder weapon and heading for the door… oh, no you need to do a lot more than that! The aim is to score 100 points (for example getting the motive and finding the killer were each 25 points).

In addition to our roaming detective in the museum, we also had the help of a host in the google drive documents who helped log our finds and remove things from the drive that we’d used. This was super helpful as we all worked on different things and solutions and vital information would have been lost if it wasn’t for our archivist.

The puzzles were a well-themed to the area they were in and logical and our detective did a great job at not leading us, but also not restricting us to the main mission. Given that they had to be quick on their feet to move around the vast building the camera work wasn’t too bad and we generally could see detail throughout the game.

Now at this point, I must add that this is what I’d call a “marmite” game, you’d either love it or hate it. With the complete autonomy of where you go and what you solve, coupled with the number of objectives you can complete/solve and the bonus missions you encounter along the way then it’s a game that many will find too frantic and unstructured. Luckily our team thrived on the mayhem and the vast quantity of information we had available and we loved it. “this is NUTS” was exclaimed by more than one of the team during the game as we lurched from a jungle to an office to a study to a lab in very quick succession.

But we loved it, especially as thanks to stumbling on a side mission and finding the stash of stolen goods we actually achieved more than the maximum score with our final total of 120! If you like fast, frantic and information-filled games then this is a must.