The Detective Society: The Disappearance of Claire Makova: Episode 2

Our experience of the first part of the Detective Society was a bit underwhelming, and I was a little apprehensive before playing this second part of the ongoing case of Claire Makova. However, this time the game really shined - delivering a much tighter, well-balanced experience, a touch of humour, and a good range of well-executed, enjoyable "puzzles".

I say "puzzles", although perhaps "activities" or "tasks" might be a better description, since they are completely diegetic and embedded into the context of a detective investigation:- there's no crosswords, arbitrary lining up transparent overlays to reveal a 4-digit code, or brainteasers set by a puzzle-crazed madman (because, why?). Instead you'll be required to employ "real" sleuthing skills - hacking phone records, checking out CCTV, tweets, and websites, and communicating with various in-game characters via SMS/email/WhatsApp to glean information that will help develop the narrative. It's fairly tech-dependent, but all the resources worked perfectly.

As this is part of an ongoing narrative, I was a little worried that I would have to remember details of the previous installment, but this isn't really a problem - there's a short recap of the relevant facts included in the briefing letter, and beyond that the game is largely self-contained.

There's no artificial "Only open this envelope when instructed" gating either - all the physical components you need to play the game fall out of the box in one big bundle, and it's your job to sort through and make sense of them. Fortunately, the signposting is excellent - there's just enough indicators to guide you into making the correct associations between the components, and the flow was absolutely smooth - every time we thought "I wonder if we have to...?" we were rewarded with success, which felt natural and rewarding, creating a completely engaging experience.

Even though the majority of content is paper- or web- based, we weren't ever bored by having to do too much reading... the text is pretty much all relevant to the case, the writing is high quality, and includes some genuinely funny moments. There's also a handful of photographs, brochures, a few physical items - all very well-designed. Note that you will need access to a *PC* (not just a mobile or tablet) and internet connection to play the game. There is also an expectation that you will have access to certain well-known PC software, but it's fairly easy to find a suitable free web-based alternative online.

We played as a couple with a bottle of wine, which I found is the optimum setup for many of these games, but I'd say that a group of up to 4 people (and 2 bottles of wine) could work on this together. It's not too hard and would be a perfectly good after-dinner game for a group, even for relatively newbies to puzzle games. Strongly recommended, and I'm really hoping that Episode 3 continues the upwards trajectory!