Tag: gaming

Categories
Board Games Comics Reviews

Riddler Puzzle Box Review

Match wits with the Riddler as Edward Nygma presents his personal puzzle box for you to solve.

The Riddler: Puzzle Box by Edward Nygma is made by McFarlane Toys, and as such expectedly looks fantastic. The 5-6 inches a side box has great detailing and largely looks like worn/distressed metal rather than the plastic it’s made of. It’s just plain cool to look at and play around with.

Solving puzzle boxes is often made more enticing by including a prize locked within, and the encased prize here is awesome. Solving each of the three sections is rewarded with a piece of a hefty metal “1:1” batarang replica. They went all out with this aspect of the box.

The website description claims the Riddler Box “features 4 challenging Batman themed puzzles.” To be perfectly blunt, this is not even remotely true. These are some of the easiest puzzles imaginable, made more difficult only by so-so implementation. One puzzle is solvable completely by accident. One I solved without the required tool, leaving me confused as to what that tool was for throughout the experience. One puzzle is a tad misleading on when the player should be trying to solve it, which led me to have the right solution but thinking it was wrong because I had to do something else first.

All that said I had a fun time with the box despite its imperfections. The puzzles are conceptually and thematically good even if easy, and I found it all interesting and engaging despite its flaws.

Which brings us to the puzzling aspect of this puzzle box as a purchase. The detail, inherent nature of making a puzzle box with hidden mechanisms, and high quality prize all add to the cost. But with a msrp of $100, which admittedly is entirely reasonable for what it is in total, people are likely to expect more from the actual puzzle box itself.

Now this has been out a while and at it’s currently available price (under $40) it’s *easily* worth it for Batman and/or puzzle box collectors. But to be completely fair with the review I’m not sure I’d have been as happy with it at full retail price.

Overall this is a great collectible containing an equally great collectible as a bonus prize, with an ok puzzle experience attached. Score one for Edward Nigma.

Thanks to everyone who’s given this a read. 2024 was a sporadic return for this blog and I hope to have more regular updates going forward in 2025. Derailments of Thought currently updates on Wednesday and Saturday.

If you enjoy the blog any support is appreciated, including shares on social media and simply continuing to read. If you happened to be inclined and able to help out monetarily please see my  Ko-fi page. Every little bit helps.

Categories
Board Games Reviews

Suspects:Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator Board Game Review

Second verse, reasonably similar to the first.

Suspects is a card based mystery game that involves visiting locations, speaking to suspects, and examining items to try to unravel the secrets behind a crime. Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator is the second collection in this series and includes three separate cases.

I enjoyed the first Suspects game, Claire Harper Takes the Stage, despite not doing particularly great solving its cases. They required catching little details, and were generally harder than other games of this type I’ve played. But it was still a well crafted game and quite fun and I was looking forward to the sequels.

Eternal Investigator provides a deeper look at the protagonist introduced in the previous collection. She’s the thread tying the cases together and this group features different times in her life.

The game plays extremely similar to the first with a deck of cards driving the gameplay with information to uncover as the cases proceed. Each case has a couple extra things to go with the deck that help frame the investigation and present initial leads to follow. Things that can be investigated are numbered and drawing the corresponding cards is how the game proceeds. It’s extremely open in letting the players decide what order to poke at things at, although at times certain mechanics hold parts of the investigation back a bit until certain progress has been made.

With the mechanics out of the way the main question is how good the cases are. In the end it’s rather hard to compare this to the first set. I again played solo, did a little better, and for the most part enjoyed these. But while one of my favorite cases in the series was here, my absolute least favorite case in any of the Suspects series was here too (including the third collection, review to come). I won’t get into spoilers but I felt it just didn’t come together and unlike all the other cases relied a bit on educated guesses (which mysteries never should).

Playing the cases in order makes sense as it progresses through Claire’s life, but they most definitely ARE NOT in progressing difficulty. The game’s fully resettable and can be passed along to others after playing.

Overall I enjoy and recommend the series and with one really good case and one solid one out of three the good still outweighs the less so in this collection. Far from perfect but still well worth checking out if you enjoyed the first batch.

Thanks to everyone who’s given this a read. 2024 was a sporadic return for this blog and I hope to have more regular updates going forward in 2025. Derailments of Thought currently updates on Wednesday and Saturday.

If you enjoy the blog any support is appreciated, including shares on social media and simply continuing to read. If you happened to be inclined and able to help out monetarily please see my  Ko-fi page. Every little bit helps.