The Kindling Hour
13 March 2021
online
4.5 out of 5.0 stars
Last weekend I sat down to play The Kindling Hour by Swamp Motel with a group of friends. I’d been looking forward to this one for quite a while, having seen a plethora of positive reviews and recommendations online.
The Kindling Hour is the third instalment of a continuous storyline, but can just as well be played as a stand alone. This new online game is a mix of escape room and immersive theatre, both of which I am a huge fan of. For this experience, we got thrown right into the deep end, with just a short recap of the story so far, and a clear goal of identifying the mole in a secret organisation to find out how to help bring them down.
Tech-wise, this game is pulling out all the stops, with in-house video conferencing, screen sharing, phone calls and text messages, outside websites to discover, it’s a delight to see what’s on offer. On the downside, there was quite a bit of lag at times, but this may be due to my laptop being a bit of an old timer. I’ll get a new one eventually, but I just don’t use it often enough to warrant upgrading at this time.
Still, despite a few little tech hiccups here and there, we had a lot of fun weaseling our way through the tasks at hand, breaking into the database of the evil organisation we were trying to defeat, and pulling out all the stops to win the game. We finished the game successfully with 43 minutes and 25 seconds left on the clock, and a strong eagerness to play the other two instalments of the story very very soon!