The Deadbolt Mystery Society – Infected (Review)

Location: Your Home!

Players:  We recommend 1-4

Price: $24.99 per box, plus $4.99 shipping

Outbreak!

Theme:

The city of Valley Falls is in crisis! Air raid sirens are sounding and helicopters are flying over dropping yellow flyers that inform residents they are within a Quarantine Zone! The whole city is beginning to be overrun with crazed citizens who seem to be infected with some sort of rage virus! With no choice but to remain within the QZ or risk being shot, detectives with the Will Street Detective Agency are racing against the clock to find patient zero before the town is brought to its knees!

First Impressions:

Infected is quite the tonal shift for The Deadbolt Mystery Society, and the shake-up comes at an excellent time! Copycat was an excellent capstone experience to the initial run of boxes, and Infected feels like the fresh start of a new chapter in the ongoing mysteries of Valley Falls and the Will Street Detective Agency. I was excited to see how the story and game mechanics played out over the course of this new box, and we were definitely not disappointed.

High Points:

Looking back, one of the most excellent facets of Infected is that the experience captures the feel of an escape room perfectly. While not something that is required for an at home mystery, it is certainly a great bonus for escape enthusiasts! At times, Infected is better at being an escape room than some actual, physical rooms I’ve been in. Even without a timer, the pressure of solving the mystery is present, and the game flow itself is perfectly suited to presenting the environment of an escape room in the comfort of your home. That said, Infected is able to present a few items that wouldn’t quite work in a physical room, enhancing the experience greatly. The best of both worlds is expertly presented here.

Detectives are dropped into the story in medias res; the world devolving into chaos around them immediately. Many excellent interactions deliver a fairly quick, yet highly effective dosage of world-building that sets the stage perfectly for newcomers and drops some easter eggs for veteran players. As the source of the outbreak comes into focus, the dire nature of your mission is fully impressed, and it’s clear you have your work cut out for you. The approach to figuring out who patient zero is should feel familiar to Deadbolt veterans, but it cleverly manipulated into something new, adding another satisfying deduction once we figured out who our suspects were. This running theme of familiar, yet fresh was awesome, and really cemented how fantastic this box was. The methods are highly approachable as well, and while they demand some puzzling, everything is incredibly intuitive.

On that note, the game flow of Infected is very smooth. At no point were we at a loss for what to do, and as we made connections between each prop, solution, and code, new mysteries revealed themselves. There are some really clever enigmas to be solved within this adventure, and attention to detail and organization is greatly rewarded throughout. Even the smallest hint has a story to tell, and the amount of satisfaction that is achieved by solving the puzzles was high. A challenging experience without becoming frustrating, Infected delivers a story and game experience that fires on all cylinders and delivers what has become my favorite case to date!

Not your average case!

Low Points:

This box flowed so excellently and shook up the usual experience so much while still retaining the feel of a Deadbolt mystery that we honestly have very little to critique.

Verdict:

The Deadbolt Mystery Society always delivers a fun experience, but Infected was next level! I’m really enjoying this new evolution, and look forward to seeing how future cases follow this one up. If you’re looking for a bombastic mystery that keeps the adrenaline high from start to finish, you cannot go wrong with Infected. I definitely recommend subscribing as well to see what happens next! Join the Deadbolt Mystery Society here! Right now, you can get 30% off your first box with the Promo Code ESCAPE30! You can also see the rest of our Deadbolt Mystery Society reviews here!

10/10 (Phenomenal)

Full Disclosure: The Deadbolt Mystery Society provided a complementary box.