Deadbolt Mystery Society: The Cabin

If you’re good at puzzles, you might get turned around with this one.

I'm going to try to do this without spoilers, so please bear with me being a little convoluted here.

There isn’t a specific starting point, which I like, but it can ruin the whole thing if you happen to be good at puzzles. If you are, I suggest that you pretend you are bad at puzzles and that need a lot of extra information, hints, and need things spelled out in order to solve things. Start at the puzzles that seem like the most simple for someone without experience doing puzzles.

I like that there weren’t as many QR codes, but all of the puzzles are solvable without the links they send you to or the QR codes that are there, which can complicate things. They seem to be operating under the assumption that you won’t be able to solve certain puzzles without the extra information and them spelling out for you the answers/telling you how to do the puzzle (which is the information they give you when you solve other puzzles.) However, all of the puzzles are pretty simple without extra information and because of this I ended up solving the puzzles in an incorrect order and solved the puzzle that gets you the biggest chunk of the extra information last. It was disappointing because that’s also where the story and background was, and by that time I already had the answer for the “solution card.” (The puzzle that gets you that extra information isn’t needed to get the answer to the solution card, nor is any of the information revealed therein. The information that is revealed (minus one interesting piece that really adds to the story) was already obvious or figured out by other means).

My other complaint is that the two “reveals” (one of which being who the killer is) were pretty obvious from the start. The interviews, documents from the agency, and the news article pretty much spell out the answer and the other reveal, which resulted in the "big reveals" being pretty disappointing.

Needed a bit of gating and/or a better introduction to the story.   There are a number of additional pieces of information available via QR code(plus password) which added to the story.  Unfortunately, the confusing timeline made these less effective than they should have been.  There was one QR code I could not open...even when using the answer in the solutions file.  

As stated in another review, the supernatural 'twist' was poorly executed and was a let down to an already underwhelming experience.  The puzzles were good, but the story was garbage and confusing.

This was the worst mystery box we have ever encountered.  It was misleading from the beginning and very confusing throughout.  People who were supposed to be alive were actually killed and one of the people whom we were told was killed actually wasn't.  In the middle of the story when there is a reunion of the players from the camp who survived the first round of killings 20 years ago, the implication was that they were all alive throughout the reunion when, in fact they were being killed off.  There was an updated article about the death of the organizer of the reunion--but he wasn't really dead--but no mention anywhere of all of the other people who were being killed.  The final solution requires the player to believe that two different characters heard actual voices in a cave that directed them to do things (really?) and then the final person turns into a coyote.  Come on....that was ridiculous and a huge waste of time and money.