Uncover the mysteries of the creature's castle & escape!


Table of Contents

Location: Home

Date Played: Jan 2024

Team size: 6; recommended 3 - 6 players

Duration: 1.5 hours + 1.5 hours

Price: ~S$46 on Amazon

Premise

Investigate the mystery of a doomed village and its cursed castle in this thrilling escape room game!

You couldn’t resist the allure of Mordengraf: a remote mountain village, overshadowed by an imposing Gothic castle and haunted by a spate of mysterious disappearances. Could there be truth in the hushed whispers of a “creature” stalking the area? As you look for answers, your investigation takes a sinister turn. Captured by an unseen force, you must escape the castle’s dungeon or become the creature’s latest victim. But you only have three hours before the creature resumes its hunt …

In Curse of the Dark, players build an interactive tiled map of the castle’s floor plan, discovering and solving over 20 interlinked puzzles. The game features innovative puzzle components and gameplay, and is designed to recreate the escape room experience at home. With an easy-to-follow hints system, and the option to split the game into two parts if required, Curse of the Dark is suitable for both novice and seasoned escape room players.

Components

The game contains a MASSIVE amount of components. Thankfully, the game does not give you all the components from the start but drip feeds them to you, ensuring that you aren't overwhelmed by the various pieces.

Most of the components are pretty solid with a few exceptions. The standees were rather fiddly and we would've appreciated it if they were more sturdy but it's justifiable considering the price of the game.

Do take note that some components require physical manipulation and is near impossible to gift this game away once it's completed.

Gameplay

Curse of the Dark is similar to Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion where you're required to place down location tiles to replicate the feel of exploring the house and discovering new things.

The game has a total of 22 puzzles for you to solve. The puzzles are presented to you in the form of cards. Once you've figured out the solution to a puzzle, you'll have to head to the answer book and scratch off the corresponding symbol that you believe is the answer. If it's green, that means you're right and you'll receive new card(s) and/or tile(s). If you're wrong, it'll display red.

Alongside the answer system is a hint system as well. Each puzzle has 2 hints followed by the solution. Our team didn't require the use of the hint system but we would've definitely appreciated more hints/puzzle to avoid giving away too much of the solution and ruin the satisfaction of solving the puzzle.

Puzzles/Thoughts

➕Superb bang for your buck. The game is well playable with 6 players and we took ~3.5 hours to complete it. That's $7.50/pax for 3.5 hours of entertainment!

➕Immersive and spooky story. The story was well-made and easy to digest as they're staggered throughout the game. The use of the location tiles accentuated the feeling of being the investigator exploring the house.

➕Crazy good puzzles. The puzzles are SO varied, unique and interesting it's unbelievable it's priced this low. It gave us a handful of "a-ha" moments and none of the puzzles fell flat or unfair. The difficulty of the game hit the sweet spot with us being a group of experienced and beginner players.

➖Some fiddly components. We would've preferred a sturdier version of it but it's a hard ask given the price of the game.

➖Not resettable. Due to the nature of the answer system and puzzles, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to gift this game away once you're done with it.

Verdict

Hands down this is one of my favourite escape room games I've ever played. With fantastic puzzle design, engaging story and amazing table prescence, it's a must play for anyone who has a slight interest in puzzles or escape rooms.

Rating: 5/5

★★★★★

You can buy their game here