Return to the scene of the crime
Location: at home
Date Played: March 2024
Team size: 1+; we recommend 2
Duration: about 2 hours
Price: about $9.99
REA Reaction
The Crime Scene series of games was one of the items that caught our eyes when we attended Toy Fair 2023. The boxes promised a series of games based around grisly murders spread throughout time and space. On that point, they delivered.
For this review, we played two of the boxed Crime Scene games: Brooklyn 2002 and London 1892. The games played similarly to each other with only slight variation in gameplay. We played Brooklyn first, which turned out to be the better choice as London increased the complexity by utilizing clues in additional places - similar to the way the Exit: The Game series uses the whole box as a designable surface.
Our team found these games to be a mixed bag. Some areas were overexplained, others under-explained. This led to a slow start and some stop-and-go play as the instructions were overly complicated for what turned out to be a relatively simple gameplay loop. But the gameplay loop itself was enjoyable. These games were highly narrative-based, and our next steps were determined by the clues we gleaned from the story and the series' namesake crime scene photograph.
By following the trail of clues through the story and crime scene, we built a few classic string-and-pushpin murderboards. The card art used this motif as a way of verifying that we had chosen the correct cards to explore. We did have some issues where we lost the thread of which cards had to verify against each other, but were able to get back on track each time. The issue was that each puzzle creates a standalone board that is discarded after solving, and with multiple cards in play at a time, we sometimes lost where a puzzle ended and the next one began.
The core gameplay idea here is interesting, but the occasional rules confusion created breaks in our flow and affected our overall enjoyment of the two boxes that we played. Being extremely organized helped, and I'm hopeful that further boxes will iterate on the flow of the game. Bringing in further game elements in the way that London built on the foundation of Brooklyn will also help in making these feel like more polished games to look forward to.
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