Mystic Case: Lost Island box

The game starts off well, with a series of fairly simple but still satisfying puzzles, and we made quick progress through the first half of the game. I'm a sucker for laser-cut wooden puzzles, and there's some nice artefacts to handle and play with here (although the actual mechanic for which they're used is a little bit mundane), as well as another well-presented object. However, while the physical props are nice, the paper-based clues are just printed on value yellow paper, and in a "Comic Sans"-esque font...

The game took a distinct downhill turn at the meta puzzle stage towards the end, which just had too many unclued elements that could be combined in different ways, and just ended up with us spending half an hour or so guessing random combinations, completely destroying any flow that had built up. There was also some very dodgy text that could have done with some proof-checking/editing. There is a provided hint sheet, but it's tediously encoded, which added further frustration because it takes another couple of minutes to decode each hint, often only to tell us something we had already done (much like some real-life escape room games then!).

So, unfortunately, we left with a slightly sour taste and somewhat of a sense of relief that it was over rather than a jubliant celebration, which is a shame because with a bit more tweaking, this could have been really good.