Sleuth Kings – Case 034: Moretti’s Curse (Review)

Kara’s Note: This review was brought to you by me! 😀

Location: Your Home!

Players:  We recommend 1-4

Price: $29.95 per box

Theme:

From the Sleuth Kings website:

Giovanni Moretti – head of an infamous crime family – has been cursed. The threats say he’ll die if he doesn’t abandon his organization and leave town, but Moretti isn’t going down without a fight. Although Sullivan would love to see the Moretti crime family dismantled, he has no choice but to help Giovanni. Unless he can figure out who is behind the curse – and fast – a gang war is going to break out. Can you help Sullivan break the curse before innocent people are caught in its crossfire?

First Impressions

It’s been so long since our last Sleuth King’s case! Very exciting to jump back in this universe, and solving puzzles for – I mean, helping – Sullivan with his cases.

Yay Points

Leave it to Sleuth Kings to take serious topics like crime families and curses and turn it into a fun and relatively family friendly puzzling experience. This case was a great reintroduction back into the foray of the Sleuth Kings world, with one of its long running villains in need of help.

“Moretti’s Curse” contained some nice creative puzzling. For the most part, the clues were clear, yet well hidden, and it’s always appreciated how the solutions are relevant and tie into the next step of the journey. The case started out with an easier win and evolved into a slightly more layered solving experience. We liked how the method of solving one puzzle in particular, and really enjoyed the penultimate meta-puzzle as well. The set-up and placement of clues throughout the case was good, and it provided for some great ah-ha moments when we realized how things clicked together.

Labeling different puzzles as clues provides for a great linear structure, but even without it, the gatekeeping of materials was effective. In particular, I enjoyed being able to put together one of the more tactile puzzles once we found the key to solving it (though I had a very strange spelling-challenge moment, much to the disbelief of my partner). (Editor’s Note: To clarify, there was a specific word that we were uncovering, and once I determined what that word was, she was adamant it was spelled differently. Hilarity ensued.)

As can always be expected, the illustrations accompanying the different puzzles were cute, and the token at the end was absolutely charming. I feel like this was probably due to an unintentional jostling of the in-transit handling, but a little piece became slightly loose. But, we found we could “re-fasten” it back to the token in a different way and the end result made it even more adorable.

Pondering Points

Although we enjoyed the intended solving methods, there were a couple points that were less intuitive and created sticking points. It wasn’t too hard to adjust to the correct path once we figured it out, but we may have unintentionally forced through to the answer (or part of the answer) and then backtracked to solve it the correct way.

It might be nice if the presentation of one of the later clues had more meaning. While there was another clue that sets you on the right path, the “meaningless” order of the clue threw me off for a bit until we were able to put the other pieces together.

There are two puzzles whose answers had letters transposed. While it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was supposed to say, it wasn’t clear if these answers were mistakenly written that way.

Verdict

Though there could be some fine tuning, “Moretti’s Curse” was a solid case with an interesting plot and enjoyable puzzles. In terms of difficulty, I would say it’s of a beginner-intermediate level. You can purchase this and other previous cases from the Sleuth King’s archives here, and if you’d like to subscribe to upcoming adventures, you can use the promo code ESCAPEADVENTURE to get $5 off your subscription here! You can also read the rest of our Sleuth Kings reviews here!

7.5/10 (Good)