Mystery House Review
One of our favorite styles of games you play are mystery games. These are games that function kind of like escape rooms where you are looking for clues and completing puzzles to solve a mystery.
We recently had the chance to play Mystery House which is a unique game in the mystery/escape room style genre.
Mystery House plays like a 3D escape room. Instead of using cards, your game board is the box, or “house.”
How Mystery House Works
Each mystery adventure gives you a set up guide that tells you where to place each wall and room card in the slots.
At the beginning of the game, most of your viewpoints into the inner part of the house are blocked by walls, windows, and doors. You have to search for clues to unlock doors, break windows, and in other ways find your way into the house.
Once inside, you’ll have to find more clues and more tools to help you navigate into different rooms, unlock items, find keys, all while working to solve the mystery.
The game itself is app driven. When you find an item on one of the house cards, you can enter that card into the app and see if the item is listed. If it is, you often will get to take it — keeping it for later use.
Other times you might find a card that has a locked door, chest, or something similar that will require you to enter a code into the app to advance.
If you’re ever stuck, you can get hints to help you know where to look so you can continue the story.
Players have 60 minutes to solve the mystery. If you get codes wrong, or misuse items you’ll lose 20 seconds at a time. However, you can play well beyond the 60 minutes until you’ve solved the puzzle.
You’re given a star rating based on how quickly you solved the puzzle and how many hints you used, but truly the experience of playing through the adventure is why you’re there — the end rating doesn’t really matter in our opinion.
Our Thoughts
As a concept, Mystery House was very cool. It does a great job of utilizing it’s 3D aspect to put you in a more immersive experience than just flipping cards.
We also had the chance to play the newest expansion, The Secret of the Pharaoh and found it to utilize the unique game design really well.
You build a pyramid that stretches above the game box and each element holds some clue that can be solves as you adventure in the pyramid a bit more during the game.
That said, there are a few things that it doesn’t do well.
1. Delivery is lacking.
The concept is very cool, but in practice we just found it to fall a bit flat. Many of the puzzles felt the same throughout the game. You’re looking through rooms searching for numbers or symbols and then adding, subtracting, multiplying or decoding the symbols to get numbers that you’ll then add, subtract, or multiply.
This is fun when done once or twice, but after a while it just gets boring.
2. Difficult to see inside the house.
Mystery House is aptly named because often looking into the house left nothing but mystery. You are going to need to grab some very bright flashlights to have any hope of seeing inside the house. Even a keychain light like this would be great. The flashlights on our phones just did not light up the inside enough and this was in addition to pulling in every floor lap we had in the home and directing it inside the Mystery House.
3. Looking into the house is awkward.
Mystery House takes about an hour or longer to play, that means for a minimum of 60 minutes you’re going to be hunched over, necks bent, craning to see inside these tiny windows. Our backs were aching by about 15 minutes in.
To solve this problem, we propped up the game on a basket, a box, and even placed the Mystery House itself on a lazy Susan turntable so we didn’t have to get up and move around the table the whole time.
While this isn’t a deal breaker for the game, it is a bummer that such a set up was needed to enjoy playing.
4. The Adventures are one-and-done but the box sticks around.
By far the biggest issue we had with the game was the fact that the adventures themselves are one time play but you need to keep the large base game to play any future expansions. The game comes only with 2 Adventures in the box, so after you play for two hours, this large 12×12 box will sit on your shelf useless until you choose to buy another adventure for to play.
Now, nothing is destroyed during the game so you can let a friend borrow the game to play with their family (our copy was borrowed to us in fact) but you can’t ever fully remove it from your home.
One of my favorite things about the Exit The Game or Unlock series of mystery games is that when I’m done with them, I either recycle the whole thing, or can gift it to a friend. It doesn’t have to take up space in my home when it no longer has any use to me.
I am honestly quite glad that our copy of Mystery House was a borrowed copy so I don’t have to have is sitting on our shelves gathering dust until the next expansion that we may or may not choose to purchase.
Final Thoughts
Overall we thought that Mystery House was a cool, unique concept and we did have a good time playing.
If you are just beginning to dabble in mystery/escape room style games, we’d recommend passing on this one. There are just simply better options out there with more exciting puzzles and mysteries to solve at a lower price point. However, if you are a huge fan of this style of game and love trying them all out, we think it’s worth checking out for the unique experience.
Bring home a copy of Mystery House for your table.
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