At Thursday Game Night hosted by CAs Haven and Ellie, I played The Scandal, a physical “escape room in an envelope” game, with digital interactions via web and phone. It is designed for ages 14 and up and for 1 to 8 players. Its target audience is families, small gatherings, and puzzle lovers seeking a light, collaborative mystery. I played this escape room with my classmate and team-partner Kelly Bonilla-Guzman.
The Scandal begins with a letter from Femi, a whistleblower who claims to have uncovered a blackmail plot involving tennis agent Ewan Müller and rising star Shoshana James. Femi explains that sensitive documents are stored in an online safe, which many agents are going to use to try to blackmail Shoshana at next week’s Grand Slam. Players must break into it to delete the files before they are leaked! To access the safe, players must solve a series of puzzles, each contained in physical items from the envelope, such as a taxi receipt, a business card, and a tournament bracket. Every puzzle yields a number between 1 and 100. Once players have solved all the puzzles, they input their answers into the website to unlock the safe and trigger the story’s conclusion (as seen below). While the puzzles are themed around tennis and travel, the goal is ultimately to solve the logic and word games in order to stop the scandal.
While The Scandal presents itself as an immersive narrative mystery, it falls short of weaving its story meaningfully into its mechanics. Although the setting (a tennis tournament scandal involving blackmail) is visually and thematically present in the materials, the actual gameplay mechanics, which consist mostly of isolated word games and visual puzzles, don’t meaningfully develop or reveal the story. Instead of allowing players to uncover a mystery, the game structures their experience as solving discrete brainteasers, with little narrative progression.
The architecture of the setting (tennis tournament, sponsors, travel, etc) informs the aesthetics of the puzzles but doesn’t control or shape the story. A stronger narrative-mechanics integration could have created emergent storytelling moments where solving a clue feels like uncovering a truth, not just arriving at a number.
Some puzzles were entertaining, but others felt forced or disconnected from the world of the story. For example, one clue (depicted below) relied on a pun; all one was given was a sticker with the logo of a tea company, which had for teacups. Thus, the answer for this puzzle was 40, since “four tea” sounds like “forty”. My game partner and I found that without the online hint, we would not have figured that out, despite the game’s promise that everything needed would be in the envelope.
Another, more engaging clue (depicted below) involved a taxi receipt and a U.S. phone number. When called, the number played a voicemail listing prices, which players used to deduce the cost of the ride. This was immersive and well-aligned with the spy-thriller vibe of the plot, even if it didn’t advance the mystery itself.
Other puzzles, like the tournament bracket (depicted below) where you had to add up the wins of the champion, or the photography clue where players compared two edited images, felt clever but mechanically detached from any real sense of investigation. Nowhere in the solving process did we uncover new information about the blackmail or the characters involved. When the twist came—that tennis star Shoshana was taking performance-enhancing drugs—it did felt like we truly earned it. Nothing we did pointed us toward that conclusion, and none of the puzzles revealed narrative insights that would have helped us discover it ourselves.
Even the one clue (depicted below) that referenced the blackmailer, Ewan Müller, was ultimately just another puzzle: a betting slip that, once solved, gave a number but no meaningful narrative information. The mystery remained static, and the story beats were backloaded into the final reveal rather than embedded in the experience.
To make the story feel more alive, the designers could integrate bits of narrative evidence into the puzzles themselves, like through intercepted emails, corrupted photos, drug test results, or transcripts of conversations. Once decoded, these could provide story revelations. This would allow players to play as investigators, piecing together the narrative from clues, rather than as riddle-solvers waiting for a post-game lore dump.
From a game design perspective, The Scandal highlights the challenge of aligning mechanics with narrative, particularly in mystery games. The game offers some of the types of fun, such as Teamwork, Challenge, Discovery, as the players must work together to solve difficult puzzles and find out what the answers to the puzzles are. However, the fun of Narrative is missing as the mechanics do not reveal anything about the story as the player is playing the game. This is where the distinction between embedded narrative and emergent narrative could have been very useful. The game relies entirely on embedded narrative (a pre-written story revealed at the end) without giving players a chance to uncover or influence the story themselves through their actions. In a more compelling design, players would encounter emergent narrative moments: story revelations that arise through gameplay, like, again, discovering a drug test result hidden in a bracket or decoding a suspicious message between characters.
In conclusion, The Scandal had a great concept idea and many fun puzzles, but it didn’t really connect the story to the gameplay; the mystery stayed the same no matter what puzzles you solved, and nothing you did helped you learn more about the blackmail plot until the very end. Some of the puzzles were clever, but they felt more like mini-games than clues. Because of this, I would recommend it to someone who really enjoys logic puzzles, but not to a big fan of narrative games. But I still had a great time playing it!
Ethics:
From an accessibility standpoint, The Scandal has significant barriers that go unaddressed. Most notably, one of the key puzzles requires players to call a phone number and listen to a pre-recorded voicemail to retrieve pricing information, a mechanic that is entirely inaccessible to players who are deaf or hard of hearing. The game provides no alternative text transcript or subtitle option for this clue, meaning that part of the puzzle cannot be completed without assistance. Additionally, the entire game relies heavily on detailed visual interpretation, from small-font receipts to analyzing images for spot-the-difference clues, making it extremely challenging, if not impossible, for players with visual impairments. There are no options for screen reader compatibility or tactile alternatives. While the paper format could have allowed for creative multimodal storytelling, the game instead assumes a default able-bodied player, which limits who can participate meaningfully in the experience. For a game marketed as collaborative and social, this oversight significantly narrows its audience.
