As an avid podcast listener, I’ve heard a lot of Hunt A Killer ads over the last year, and the core concept has always intrigued me. Hunt A Killer’s main product is a subscription box that lets you unravel a single mystery over multiple sessions, but I don’t think it’s worth spending time or money on a six-month subscription to a game you’re not sure you’ll enjoy. I hesitated. However, these two standalone games are pretty easy to get into as sessions are less than his two hours long.
In these games, you (and optionally a group of friends) become a private investigator, examining evidence sent by your contacts to solve cases. His one of the games, Homicide At The Heist, was an Ocean’s 11-type scenario. A diamond-stealing robbery goes awry, a safecracker dies, and his brother hires you to figure out what happened. The other “RIP At The Rodeo” was more interesting. A rodeo clown is impaled by a bull and his ex-wife suspects cheating. She asks for your help in figuring out who was responsible for his death.
The selling point of these games is that they use a mix of physical and digital media, but each game relies on digital to varying degrees. Some of my friends liked it, some didn’t. While I felt that the strength of this game lay in its lovingly designed props, it was a lot of fun to see the screenshots of the messages between the game’s characters. There’s a lot of information on digital media, but it felt great to actually play with high-quality props. What I particularly liked is that both sets have locked boxes that block out information until you figure out how to unlock them. It should be noted here that some of the evidence is handwritten and transcribed onto digital resources, so while having a digital component helps with accessibility, it doesn’t necessarily add to gameplay. .
I never felt like information was being arbitrarily hidden. This is a huge achievement for a game that needs to balance gameplay and story. Throughout the two games, we read pages of transcripts, autopsy reports, police interviews, and event brochures. Some of it helped me break into password-locked folders and find physical padlock combinations. As we constructed timelines, checked alibi, and discussed possible motives, it felt like the fog lifted and the story unfolded. There were also red herrings, but they felt like complications left behind by human clutter, not obstacles added to make the experience harder.
The article was very interesting and it helped me a lot. A few times I laughed out loud reading the evidence to my friends, especially in RIP At The Rodeo, where the characters fell in love with me. Each of them has their own personality and drama that is reflected in every sentence in the game. For example, if you find a victim’s diary, it’s peppered with tiny spelling mistakes and written in a sharp character voice, giving details about him instead of telling you. Or maybe reading a transcript of a conversation, a character says something stupid and gets teased by the rest of the group. The puzzle quality varied from game to game (I liked Rodeo), but the writing quality remained high. What’s great is that after you figure out who the culprit is, you get a letter telling the rest of the characters what happened, and all the extra plotlines can be worked out.
I’m not sure if the difficulty of the two sets was inconsistent or if I was just tired after solving the first set and didn’t have as much energy for the second set. RIP At The Rodeo was fairly easy if you had the patience to read the evidence carefully, and didn’t require you to access the game’s hint system. However, in Murder Heist, he refused to look at the hints, leading to him banging his head against the wall trying to open a locked box. Eventually, I started spinning the wheel of the padlock to unlock it, and this worked. After looking at the solution, I found that I could never guess what the combination was. Overall, Heist felt much more situational and abstract than his more personal and concrete Rodeo.
These games made me feel like a genius when I found the hidden clues, but like a fool when I stumbled on a puzzle, and when I solved the mystery, I felt like a genius. It made me feel like a genius again. They made me feel like an easy chair detective, solving crimes while sitting on an old couch in a friend’s apartment. They made me feel like a conspiracy theorist, coming up with wild theories about what happened and trying to find evidence to confirm them. I had a lot of fun playing a good mystery game with my friends. I didn’t have to prepare. Because everything was already in the box, and to top it off, each box contained a cute souvenir. I hope they focus on their strengths of good writing and well-crafted props rather than pushing themselves too hard with digital media they don’t need.