Escape From The Haunted Mansion
08 February 2021
at home
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
I grew up loving Scooby-Doo & the Mystery Inc.’s silly shenanigans, so when I found out there’s a Scooby themed escape game, I just had to procure it! This game is everything I wanted it to be! Thoroughly themed and very well designed, boasting an immersive look and feel of the beloved characters. You can play this solo or with a small group. To play, you take over one or more of the characters each so all five are in use and work together to solve the case.
This game is very cooperative and encourages discussion, joint decisions, and lots of silliness. Each character has a main skill, Velma can research, Shaggy can eat, Daphne can use items, Scooby can sniff, and Fred can investigate. Through this feature, every character gets different results from the same items. It’s really fun to go through the rooms and try these skills out!
Aimed at a younger crowd, the puzzles are definitely more of a beginner level and can easily be played with older children or silly adults. I really enjoyed the game play and thought it was very well done. There were really only two gripes I had with this game. Firstly, there’s one puzzle that relies entirely on colours (generally a bad idea as up to 10% of all people have a form of colour blindness) and the colours were not consistent across the several different print media used, which lead to us having to guess to solve this puzzle. It’s so easy to use patterns or shade gradations instead of minor colour variations, for more accessibility.
But an even bigger gripe was the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2 ends with a “this is the end of chapter 2, keep exploring for now and then read the following paragraph to begin the final phase of the game” set-up, which chapter 1 sorely needed! Additionally, the list of items needed to start chapter 2 with didn’t include a vital important item and the character that finds it is no longer available! We eventually figured it out, but it cost us a good 25 minutes of confusion. This could definitely be improved!
Still, we really enjoyed playing and loved how well the branding was done. It took us around 3.5 hrs to finish. It very much falls in line with typical Scooby cases and was a delight to solve!