The Detective Society: Family Adventures comprises three solvable must-have mysteries for families and children who have even a passing interest in being able to pronounce 'Case closed!' to whomever might be around to listen.
Designed by Jamie Armstrong, Joe Mills, Tristan Rogers and Dan Wiseman, and published by Damfino Productions, the Family Adventures are packaged similarly to a DVD trilogy boxset - the collection comprising three family-friendly escape-room/puzzle type games on themes which straddle the arenas of light to faintly silly: The Missing Potion, Time Travel Trouble and The Smashed Piñata. Each adventure is a standalone puzzle with differing challenges and activities, using the mixed media of physical materials and audio/video content accessed online. All three adventures are pitched at a similar level, requiring no prior experience or preparation. However, because of the online aspect, the boxset is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Happily, once you’ve scanned the code and linked up, there are no email requirements or paywalls but, as ever Board's Eye View recommends the largest screen you can get your hands on for this kind of games: you can play the games with any smartphone but you'll enjoy them more - particularly as a family experience, with a larger screen that players can all view at the same time.
The path of the puzzles in each box is driven by the very smart implementation of digital technology through a chatbot which takes on the role of your adventure liaison. Communication with the liaison is via a chatroom/messenger board which both gives and requests clues regarding the information in the physical packs. We were very pleased to see that the chatbot is tolerant of grammar typos (for example, over whether or not letters are capitalised). This allows for a smooth game.
With this type of games, an adult is often compelled to take on the management role of ‘wise guide’ in order to allow younger players to have the fullest enjoyment in creative deduction and discovery. In my position as a parent-who-has-to-compete-with-TV I found this a little anxiety-inducing because there is very little troubleshooting support from the chatbot facility. Certainly, my children (6, 7 & 8 years respectively) needed me to hover nearby to mediate on the occasion that words were tricky, one child was taking over or they were simply stuck. In one adventure, a simple maths miscalculation led to a lengthy stalemate during which the children became restless and distracted while I was left to try and save the process with no obvious guidance or cheat-sheet: being able to check an answer would have helped greatly in this situation.
The Adventures require some destruction of materials (unless you have tracing paper on hand…) so they are not easily ‘pass-on-able’. Ultimately tho', the true value is in the quality family time you can enjoy, which you can’t pass on anyway. In this respect, the puzzles are pitched perfectly, with each Adventure providing a good 60-90 minutes detecting-time before you too can claim 'Case closed!'
(Review by Michael Harrowing)