Location: Your Home!
Players: We recommend 1-4
Price: $29.95 per box
A pox on you!
Theme:
Ken Suzuki and his wife live a carefree life of travel and leisure, recording their experiences for their popular travel blog, but Ken’s life is turned on its head when a homeless woman approaches and curses him! Since then, his health has quickly deteriorated. He’s come to Sullivan, hoping that the PI can make some sense of the cryptic note that he found in his pocket after the encounter, and it’s up to you to figure out who’s really behind this curse before Ken gets any worse!
First Impressions:
We can never get enough Sleuth Kings, so what better way to pass the time between monthly cases than to order a previous mystery from the archives? Case 004 proved to be an excellent adventure, so when digging in to The Curse, we knew it would be a good time!
Elements of the Curse!
High Points:
In lieu of an interview, Ken provided us with his “Curse Log,” which was an excellent read and conveyed the needed information in a fresh and clever way. This, along with the bits and pieces of the mystery that he and Sullivan had collected provided an authentic feel to the mystery that we really enjoyed. Clues lead into each other intuitively, and each puzzle is well layered and contributes to the story in an interesting way. The difficulty of the experience increases gradually, providing a fantastic learning curve for newer players, making this a great entry point to the Sleuth Kings Universe. A late game puzzle provides an awesome interaction that I’ve rarely seen duplicated in subscription box form, and would love to see more of in the future! The story itself is a well crafted and sometimes humorous tale, and provides an awesome climax and denouement via the post-mystery epilogue we received a few days later in the mail.
Travel in style with your new Sleuth Kings luggage tag!
Low Points:
One late game puzzle presented a fairly vague guess and check puzzle which we were hung up on after it had already been solved due to our interpretation of the clues leading us to believe there was more to the story. The climax of the mystery was telegraphed more than usual, and we had solved the case, but required a very specific phrase in order to get this across to Sullivan, which resulted in a few somewhat jumbled auto-responses from our detective pal, which broke the usual immersive atmosphere of a Sleuth Kings experience.
Verdict:
Case 005 is an archived case, and though it may be an older experience, it still shows off that excellent Sleuth Kings quality that we’ve come to expect, packing mind-bending puzzles, amazing props, and a fantastic story within it’s box! I definitely recommend giving it a shot, and you can order it via the Sleuth Kings Archives. If you’re interested in joining Sullivan on his adventures on an ongoing basis, you can also use the promo code ESCAPEADVENTURE to get $5 off your subscription here! The rest of our Sleuth Kings reviews are here for your perusal!
8.5/10 (Great)
Full Disclosure: Sleuth Kings provided a complementary box.
Escape Room Adventurer 