Exit: The Game – The Sunken Treasure (Review)

Location: Your Home!

Players:  We recommend 1-2

Price: $14.99

Treasure in the Waters

Theme:

From the Thames and Kosmos website:

Setting sail for dangerous waters, you embark on a treacherous quest for the legendary treasure of the Santa Maria. While investigating a mysterious shipwreck, something goes terribly wrong and you are trapped deep underwater! Can you solve the riddles of the wreck and recover the treasure before your time is up?

First Impressions:

I’ve always loved Exit: The Game’s highly interactive puzzles, and it’s actually pretty surprising I haven’t gotten around to reviewing their products just yet. When the newest set of games arrived, however, I knew I’d have to work it into the review schedule! The Sunken Treasure seemed right up my alley, boasting a nautical theme and interesting box art, so we started the next run of Exit games there.

High Points:

As always with Exit games, The Sunken Treasure had loads of really stand out moments that took us by surprise! At first, I thought there were relatively few props and wasn’t sure how involved this experience would be, but I was glad to see that this game continued to hold to the standard of using absolutely every prop to it’s fullest to deliver an extremely tactile game. Even though this was my seventh foray into the Exit universe, and I had an idea of what to expect, I found that many of the revelations included within the box were still cleverly hidden from perceptive players. A more beginner level experience, we still found some puzzles to be challenging, but the simpler ones were still a fun solve, with several leading us to exclaim how clever we found the puzzle to be. The game also didn’t disappoint content wise, as it still took us a good 56 minutes to complete, longer than some great escape rooms we’ve broken out of!

This was the first Exit game we’d played that was a one hundred percent linear experience, and while that could serve to bottleneck everything, I felt that linearity served this particular experience well. Though you cannot jump between puzzles, the overall experience isn’t obtuse at all, and each step just takes some thought and a fair measure of outside, (and sometimes inside,) the box thinking. The experience held tighter to the storyline than some other Exit games have, and the linear nature really helped make sure that each step progressed the story as well as the game flow. Tight is one word that can absolutely describe the experience playing The Sunken Treasure, and not in the 90’s sense. Each facet of the game feels like it has been tested to ensure that the puzzles, logical flow, and story are tightly crafted and serve to keep the adventure trucking along nicely. Though there were points we needed to stop and think, or set up a solution, we never felt as though we had become mired or thrust into tedium.

So much puzzling treasure is hidden within these few props!

Low Points:

The linear nature of the game does mean that it cannot handle more than two players especially well. Those with a lot of experience will want to cap things at two, definitely, and newer players may find they have more fun and will get to be more involved with fewer players as well. A particular puzzle becomes somewhat more difficult due to the vague and possibly misleading wording, but on the whole the experience does not stray from the tighter logic presented in the rest of the enigmas. The game itself is a lot easier than other Exit games, and while this isn’t really that bad of a thing, veteran players may feel they’re being led by the hand a bit too much.

Verdict:

A simpler adventure, I still recommend that anyone interested in Exit: The Game try out The Sunken Treasure. Newcomers will get an awesome and tightly plotted introduction to the game series, and long time players will find a lot of new and engaging content to enjoy within the box. You can pick this one up from your friendly local games store now! We recommend checking out Atomic Empire in Durham, NC, check out their online store here!

8.5/10 (Great)