Photo above is property of Hunt A Killer
Company: Hunt A Killer
Game: Death At The Dive Bar
Country: USA 🇺🇸
Language: English
Type of Game: Puzzles By Mail 📬
Genre: Murder Mystery, Detective
Date Played: December 18, 2021
Difficulty (based on 4 players): 7/10
Size of Team: 1-6 ppl (Ages 14+)
Time: Unlimited (Approx. 45-60 mins.)
Price: $26.99
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As detectives with the Gray Investigation Agency, you have been given the task to investigate the suspicious death of Nick Webster, the owner of the Old Scratch Tavern. The Perdition Police has ruled Nick’s death as an accident but Carmen Rojas, a friend and employee of Nick’s, believes that foul play was involved. She has sent you her findings and is hoping you can discover what truly happened to Nick.
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Opening the box, we were welcomed with a letter from Michelle Gray from Gray Investigations. She will introduce the case to you. From there, you will also find another letter from Carmen Rojas, who believes her boss, Nick Webster was murdered and is looking for some help to prove it. Diving into the rest of the box, there is an abundance of items, papers and photos which will need to be looked over to solve the case.
Photos above are property of Hunt A Killer
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This game is less escape room and more deducing. We were presented with 4 suspects and the goal was to find the one person who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime using the evidence at hand. If you missed the Crime Solving 101 class, there was a nice introduction to the game in the rules, defining those three aspects of mystery.
There were 4 of us around a table looking at the different pieces of evidence, talking through what we were finding and sharing any new, relevant information (Gasp! Mrs. X was friends with Mr. Y). One thing we liked was that everything in the box was relevant to some piece of information that we needed and could usually be put aside once you determined the information needed. If we were stuck on getting information from a piece of evidence, there was a website that we could go to for hints. The hints were set up with nice leveling to allow a few hints before revealing the answer. Once we were done looking at everything, we were able to do our best to piece together the information we discovered and determine who committed the murder.
One thing we found lacking was once you open the solution envelope; it will only wrap up the story about who the killer was. Since we ended up at the wrong conclusion, we were hoping to have a better explanation of what we missed and how the killer was to be determined. There was more information as well as an epilogue letter on the website that easily could have been placed in the envelope.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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There were minimal puzzles to solve here but there was plenty of deducing to be done. Like a true detective, most of the items involved us trying to get information from them and linking them to other facts. There was one piece of evidence that some non-escape room players may not know how to solve but the game had a guide in the introduction that we found helpful in giving us the information needed.
One thing that threw us off was the instructions telling us not to trust anyone so there were a few times we found ourselves questioning the authenticity of items. Do not overthink things or you will find yourself going down meaningless rabbit holes.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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For a detective deduction game, we had a blast with this one. Anyone who loves to make evidence boards would have a lot of fun with this game. All the items had information that had to be extracted, some were easier ones with some you had to comb over a little find. Four seems to be a good number of players since we could all look over everything, draw conclusions from them and talk out loud to share our findings. Even at the end, we had to take the notes we all had made and try to solve the mystery. Overall, a solid and well thought out game.
Check out our interview with the creators to understand more on the development side of these game:
(If you do decide to try this game, please remember to let them know that you heard it from"ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)
Disclosure: We thank Hunt A Killer for providing us with a sample of their game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.