Location: Your Home!
Players: We recommend 1-4
Price: $30 per box
Crikey!
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! This month takes place in Sydney, Australia, land of big dangerous animals that want to kill you!
First Impressions:
This one is a little late, so for background, after we completed the horrendous Mont St. Clair box, we had cancelled our subscription. You can read the linked review for more details, but to summarize, it was really that bad. However, our subscription had apparently recently charged us, so we received one last box. We sat on it for a while, as we had plenty of other excellent games to play though and were wary of the quality of this box, which was originally released in October of 2017.
High Points:
The initial puzzle is a real brain teaser that was truly a pleasure to solve, with satisfying ah ha moments peppered throughout the solve. There are a few more clever interactions we had a good time with, but the rest of the box didn’t really stand up to the great set up that this puzzle promises. There’s an excellent logic puzzle set up with a very high stakes story moment, which requires careful attention to detail and feels rewarding to complete. The fun facts and historical notes that are included throughout the experience make this an excellent game to present in a school based or family learning environment. The experience is blessedly non-linear, which has always been a boon when solving Finders Seekers boxes, and allows the game to prevent becoming bogged down by getting stuck on a puzzle.
G’day from Australia!
Low Points:
This is an older box that has been rereleased without any meaningful update, and it absolutely shows. The props feel much cheaper than more recent boxes, and the whole experience is sparser on the whole. Many of the puzzles are easy to glitch past, even accidentally, and we found that at the end of the game, we still hadn’t used one set of props and were unable to solve one of the more obtuse puzzles but were still able to easily complete the meta puzzle, which was a weird unscramble game wherein buttons marked as hints were one hundred percent necessary for those who do not speak fluent Aussie slang. Luckily, a friend of mine is a true blue Australian native, so this puzzle was very easy for us to complete, but I can see casual solvers having difficulty with this one. It’s basically one step down from having to unscramble or decode words that aren’t from your native language. Most puzzles are fairly basic, and are based off of themes and mechanics that most experienced players will have solved before, and will not be very exciting for newcomers either.
Verdict:
Sydney, Australia was definitely a more finely tuned and well designed experience than Mont Saint Clair, but still doesn’t hold a candle to the Finders Seekers golden period of the Athens, Petra, and Mexico City boxes. The fact that a box from over a year ago that hasn’t been updated in any way was the main offering did not instill enough confidence in me to consider resubscribing either. As my fiancée has noted, this would make a really great homework assignment, but doesn’t really justify its $30 price tag. If you’d like to sign up anyway, you can do so here. If you sign up through our link, we’ll earn credits towards a free box, and can bring you more content! You can read the rest of our Finders Seekers reviews here!
5/10 (Mediocre)
Escape Room Adventurer 