Finders Seekers – Mexico City, Mexico (September Box Review)

Location: Your Home!

Players: We recommend 1-4

Price: $30 per box

This one made me want to watch Coco again.

Theme:

Each month, Finders Seekers invites you to accept a mysterious mission from the head seer. These “finds” are located in cities around the world and involve high stakes, cryptic puzzling, and shadowy societies! You’ll need a clever mind and some google-fu in order to piece together the puzzles and complete the find! And when you do, you might even receive a reward!

First Impressions:

Each month we’ve noticed that Finders Seekers has upped their game, and this month is no exception! Even more items were delivered this go, and the quality of the props continue to improve. I was also very excited to see an Aztec calendar included as I have my own sitting in my living room!

The props just keep getting better and better!

High Points:

The vast majority of this box is extremely hands on, and the tactile nature of many of the puzzles really allow this adventure to Mexico City to shine! Some of my favorite puzzles ever for this subscription are inside this box, and range from folding and crafting to painting, to using an Aztec calendar to deciper codes! Many of the interactions involved are also brilliant in their design, offering elegant solutions and intuitive ah ha moments, something we felt was sometimes lacking in other finds provided by Finders Seekers. The dreaded boring process puzzle that we’ve come to expect in every box has finally been eradicated from this one, and it’s a trend that I hope continues to hold, as the game flow doesn’t break down severely during this experience, and held up for a good three hours for us! The online component is, as always, an excellent supplement to what is provided in the box, and includes a bevy of excellent facts about the history and culture of Mexico City. It’s always a lot of fun to learn about the exotic locales that Finders Seekers helps us visit from the comfort of our own homes!

Spoiler Alert: You get to paint!

Low Points:

One of the most fun puzzles in the box, (the painting puzzle seen above,) only provides enough tools to allow for one person to interact with it. I’m sure a good many people could scrounge up another paintbrush, but for those that don’t have one handy, it might be much less fun just watching as the other player paints. This puzzle also has a fairly ambiguous answer, as the answer required leaves out one of the words commonly associated with the phrase. There is also a typo in another of the puzzles, which tripped us up, but since the overall solution was fairly long, we were able to manually correct it. The hint system for Finders Seekers leaves much to be desired still, as a fairly simple puzzle tripped us up pretty massively, and the hints were too vague to provide any direction. Though it was the only hints we used, we’ve run into poor hinting in the past, and have noticed that many of the puzzles provide none at all, to the frustration of some of our compatriots in the Finders Seekers Facebook group.

Verdict:

This was easily the best Finders Seekers box we’d done yet! It seems they’ve been improving each month, and I am now more an more excited to see that a new adventure has arrived from these guys! At this point, I’d definitely recommend subscribing if you love a good puzzle hunt. Order your next adventure here! If you sign up through our link, we’ll earn credits towards a free box, and can bring you more content! They also provide a fun free Chicago mini hunt if you’d like to get a feel for their style of puzzles. You can read the rest of our Finders Seekers reviews here!

8.5/10 (Great)