I played Puzzle Post: The Scandal in office hours, which is a mystery puzzle game where all the contents – from the case to the information and clues you need to solve the puzzle – are in one brown envelope. I played it in office hours with three other people, and it seemed like the target audience is about 10+, with a specific focus on families, since the puzzles seemed to have a wide variety of easy to hard difficulty levels and a relatively light theme rather than the standard murder mystery. However, the website says 14+. It is created by Puzzle Post, unsurprisingly, which was created by friends who enjoy games. In my opinion, a critical piece of how the narrative is woven in the game is through the aesthetic of the clues, and this is also what makes the player invested in the game, but this narrative fails to hold up and continue to engage the user when they’re working through the actual clues and inputting answers.
To explain this, at the start, the realism was the most noticeable piece when opening the envelope. The components were different sizes and shapes, and they were realistic – seating charts, business cards, flyers, betting papers. This pulled me into the story, and made me want to find the connections and figure out how to solve the puzzle. This was especially important to do, since it is a game in a box. I knew the overall narrative from the one-pager summary of what we were doing and why, but the pieces drew in the color of that narrative, giving me details of an outline I knew. I thought the designers built on this really well, with truly realistic pieces, such as calling the number on the taxi card in order to get the fare rates, with a realistic-sounding voicemail, and going to the website on the business card in order to see pictures of the stadium. These pieces truly made the game and narrative come even more to life, going beyond the papers in my hand to encompass other mediums.
At the beginning, especially through this intentionally-designed realism, the game creates a feel of immersion, realism, and mystery, with an emergent story developing as you play. The dynamics support that through an open-ended exploration of the items given to you. However, I felt like this narrative and engagement started to fall apart for me when I was solving the clues. All of the clues were numbers from 0 to 100. These would be found by working with the words and letters and images of the message rather than putting together the concepts to build a story. In fact, we already knew the complete story from the beginning; we didn’t have to uncover it but rather find a code in order to delete the contents of the file that proved this.
For example, it was extremely cool and captivating to go to the website below and see the stadium and search for a clue, but the answer to this prompt was ‘35,’ the number in the stands, rather than any sort of logical deduction based on the contents of the photograph. These types of answers, to every clue, pulled me out of the story back into the world in which I was simply solving a puzzle in a box. I understand that the designers were probably trying to keep the puzzles approachable and self-contained, but in the process of doing that, it felt to me like they lost a narrative momentum that I think could’ve made the game better and more fun. I personally would have loved to have the puzzles logically connect into an answer and uncover more of the narrative as time passed, rather than simply filling in the details of the narrative we already knew. I would have loved to tie problem solving to discovery.
In terms of accessibility, I think this game has multiple issues: there aren’t any built-in features to help people with visual impairments or dyslexia, who may have difficulty understanding and working with the information. This is especially true because different types of clues are presented in different ways – some small-print, some big; some jumbled words, some straightforward; some thin fonts, some handwriting style, some bolded – which can be difficult for these individuals. I’m not sure if there was optimization for a screen reader on the website, but that might have been an issue in terms of inputting clues. However, I will say that I think some of these pieces are difficult to balance – if you offer a password-protected version of the game online, the password will likely be leaked and you’ve given all your content for free. However, I can also imagine a parent who buys this for their family and one of their kids with a learning disability or low vision struggling with this rather than enjoying. Even something as simple as signage on the outside of the box gauging difficulty and accessibility for the game may help with this.
Overall, Puzzle Post: The Scandal was a great example of how aesthetics can pull players like me into a story, and also how if the mechanics don’t support that, it can pull people out.
