Photo above is property of Buffalo Games
Company: Buffalo Games
Game: Medical Mysteries: NYC Emergency Room
Country: USA 🇺🇸
Language: English
Type of Game: Tabletop Games 📬
Genre: Detective
Date Played: July 24, 2024
Difficulty (based on 2 players): 6.5/10
Size of Team: 1-4 ppl
Time: 60 Mins. per patient
Price: $25.00
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House - the game!
“Medical Mysteries: NYC Emergency Room" puts you in the shoes of an Emergency Room doctor, tasked with ensuring your patient survives the night - their lives are in your hands. Can you work with your team to examine, diagnose and treat your patient, before it’s too late? As an Emergency Room Doctors, it is your job to examine your patients’ mysterious symptoms, review their medical history and uncover hidden clues. Work together to diagnose the conditions. Follow clues, run tests, consult specialists and use your instincts to diagnose the patient, and finally make the right treatment decisions to help your patient survive the night. Then, work to determine the underlying cause of their condition. Earn points along the way for making the right treatment decisions and helping your patient survive the night.”
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Can I just say what a top notch production this is, they really got this thing ready for prime time. The medical game aesthetic is very on point, evocative and typographically pleasing in a way that seduces our attention. Janky aesthetics can really detract from a game despite its playability. There's something about that basic, uniformly ugly and unimpressive, lack of aesthetic good sense that just repels the imagination. Even for a function over aesthetic type of person like me is still a deal breaker. Ok, but what's more impressive is how the information in the game itself is organized and broken down. The game not only looks great, it reads extremely well too, in terms of how its content is partitioned, it's very playable without ever becoming overwhelmingly chaotic. It's also well tailored to being played and shared by multiple players, allowing the group to easily swap and simultaneously pour over the elements of the case. Minor criticism I have read in other reviews is that the text at times can be a bit small for the degree of reading you may encounter - this is true but it may be necessary given limitations of space, though I agree if your ever making the players read a lot then be sure to make it easy on the eyes.
Photos above are property of Buffalo Games
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If you are in any way familiar with the brilliantly fun 2000s TV show House, where the eccentric and sassy eponymously named main character plays medical Sherlock Holmes (he even has his own Watson nee Wilson as a straight man sidekick), diagnosing patients and their mysterious illnesses, working his brilliant powers of deductions through many strange twists and turns until inevitably and coincidentally House gets to the right answer just as the show is nearing its hour run time. It teaches you that medical cases make for great mysteries, in both theme and format disease and our treatment of it really lends itself to interesting detective work. It also teaches you that though we treat illness in a hospital, the cause and thus the pathology of these diseases starts beyond it. Hence House eventually figured out that the girl's symptoms looked a lot like heavy metal poisoning, which lead him to figure out that her mom was secretly dosing her oatmeal with lithium to curb her budding teenage promiscuity, and if he wanted to not just cure the symptoms but cure the disease, he needed to stop mommy from drugging little Jainy.
How does the game play? Well first of all they put you through a great tutorial that is easy to follow and really shows you the ropes. The beauty with this game is that the theme and the format of playing doctor immediately lend themselves to our puzzling imagination. Same goes for legal games, we immediately get that we are trying to prove or defend a case and its facts. They are natural extensions of detective games, and they have the same virtue that they invoke a world and its logic that are immediately relatable to the player and which therefore enrich their immersion in it, and so the puzzles too have the potential to be more natural and mimetic. This game plays exactly as you think it does: a patient comes in with various symptoms, medical background history, vital stats, and a intake interview, from which you then try and piece together a course of action, using interviews, tests, drugs, expert analysis, operations, all the while the patient states and the general story dynamically respond to these actions. You race to at least stabilize the patient if not hopefully figure out the pathology of their disease, all within a limited number of time/actions.
This setup is near perfect, my only criticism being this, that the tutorial should give you slightly more of a sense of how subtle the cases can be, as in they aren't just a matter of going through the actions available to you, that as often happens in House, if you want to score 100/100 you really do need to do more than just stabilize the patient and determine their medical condition, you need to trace that pathology back into the context in which it originated. This is both the genius of the game, since it makes success something more than just the correct and mechanical sequencing of medical actions, but it also comes at you a little too fast, and that by the time you realize this at the end of the first two cases are all like this, you've already played them and can't go back. It's also not explicitly clear in the tutorial that you will always have to make this leap. There was a bit of a disconnect in the leap between stabilizing the patient and correctly identifying the pathology of the patient's disease. The information you get from your actions will not ultimately give you the answer itself, you need to make that logical leap yourself. Let me just say though the answers themselves are quite clever - so this is more of a warning to players, take your time!
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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On the one side there is the patient, their symptoms, their pre-existing conditions, and their environment and its factors, and on the other is this medical guide book explaining all the actions you can take, what they might do/resolve, as well as what certain symptoms look like. So basically you are trying to correctly parse out the symptoms, identify them correctly, and cure them as it would be, using this guide book, your common sense and powers of deduction, as well as an awareness of how their environment might have precipitated this sudden disease. All the information you need can generally be found in the guidebook, it's just up to you to match the information with the symptoms, and navigate the results in an appropriate way. In this way the game is naturally rich in its complexity, having a intuitively simple form and yet proving informationally and deductively quite complex. Beautiful, that's how a mystery game ideally should be. So, for instance, if a patient is dehydrated, you may spend an action giving them some IV fluids, this may stabilize them, as well as potentially make them communicate more, in addition to eliminating some of the symptoms and thereby simplifying your process of deducing the complex relation of symptoms and disease. A patient can have more than one thing wrong with them, and they can also have overlapping and unconnected symptoms, so it's really a process of untangling this web of symptoms and diseases. A test may ultimately tell you what they have, it can tell you how to cure it, and that may be enough, but often times there's more to it, and this may not tell you how they got it, and unless you can communicate this fact the disease may be perpetuated by their lifestyle or environment, and so usually the final leap you have to make demands that you connect their pathology to these conditions, ala House, which makes for a much more satisfying game then simply running some tests and finding the inoperable brain tumor. It also makes it more than simply a medical game, but a story game, and more interestingly than not, most diseases have a exotic story behind them.
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Overall, this is a great game, and one in which I highly recommend. It's just a really well done production, and they have raised the medical theme to the level of a masterful detective game. The worst thing I can really say about the game is that its begging for more content. Here's the dilemma: for all that high production and thought which has gone into it I feel like it was over much too soon! It isn't really replay-able, unless you fail, and even if you succeed I recommend you look through the story cards to see all the different paths you could have taken, as well - in a more morbid vein - all the ways in which your carelessness could have killed the patient. This series is begging for an expansion (which it will soon get in the fall, and which i will be playing as soon as it comes out), in both the scenarios as well as the extent of the medical symptoms and knowledge it encompasses. I hope, hope!, that the expansion skips with the tutorial and amps up the complexity as much as possible, though I fear that for sake of popular appeal it will mirror the onboarding of the base game. In any case, go out and grab this game and contribute to the creators so that it may live a long and happy life as a successful series.
(If you do decide to try this game, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)
Disclosure: We thank Buffalo Games for providing us with a sample of this game. Although complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.
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