What Mystery Beholds the Knight?
Released in the UK in late 2020, EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight is another hit in the brilliant escape room style puzzle games from Kosmos. Rated 3/5 by Kosmos for difficulty, this is a great step up from the beginner puzzles (which are usually rated 2/5) without being too tricky. With a selection of diverse riddles, can you work out how to enter the crypt to find the Knight’s legendary artifact?
Game Unboxing and Setup
EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight has a fairly compact box as with other EXIT games, and inside you’ll find a short rulebook, a decoder disk for solving the riddles, a booklet titled “Notes on the Legend of Sir Reginald Wreston’s Artifact” which will provide you with much needed information in your game, a clear plastic sheet with some strange looking markings (you will need to cut along the line to create three pieces and these are identified as the “strange items”), and a deck of cards which will need to be separated into three piles, riddles, answers, and help cards. You will probably also want to grab yourself a pen or pencil and some paper for this game, and keep a pair of scissors handy. Don’t look at any of the game components other than the rulebook before the game tells you to.
What Mystery Beholds the Knight?
Released in the UK in late 2020, EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight is another hit in the brilliant escape room style puzzle games from Kosmos. Rated 3/5 by Kosmos for difficulty, this is a great step up from the beginner puzzles (which are usually rated 2/5) without being too tricky. With a selection of diverse riddles, can you work out how to enter the crypt to find the Knight’s legendary artifact?
Game Unboxing and Setup
EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight has a fairly compact box as with other EXIT games, and inside you’ll find a short rulebook, a decoder disk for solving the riddles, a booklet titled “Notes on the Legend of Sir Reginald Wreston’s Artifact” which will provide you with much needed information in your game, a clear plastic sheet with some strange looking markings (you will need to cut along the line to create three pieces and these are identified as the “strange items”), and a deck of cards which will need to be separated into three piles, riddles, answers, and help cards. You will probably also want to grab yourself a pen or pencil and some paper for this game, and keep a pair of scissors handy. Don’t look at any of the game components other than the rulebook before the game tells you to.
Gameplay Overview – No Spoilers
Once you’ve set up EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight, you can begin your game by opening up the booklet and reading the last entry it contains, a note about the artifact you’re looking for and the last hope of a person who wanted to find it. It quickly becomes clear that you’re working against the clock to find the artifact as the crypt in which the artifact is contained is sealed and the secret within will only be visible in the moonlight at midnight.
Players work together (unless you’re choosing to play this game solo of course) to solve riddles by collecting riddle cards from the deck as the game tells you to, using the cards and the booklet to solve them, and
checking if you’re successful by inputting your answer into the decoder disk and reading the answer card it reveals for you. If you’re correct, players then get rewarded with more riddle cards and can move forward in the quest for the artifact. There are a total of 10 riddles in EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight, and each one requires you to think and work out something differently to the last.
You’ll have to piece together a family tree, use the phases of the moon to your advantage, work your way around a map, decipher the strange glyphs, uncover a secret message, and use every single component provided for you to navigate your way through the puzzles to success.
Final Thoughts
One thing I noticed only AFTER my own playthrough when I came to sit down and write my review for EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight is possibly an error in one of the game’s riddles. It certainly gave me a laugh when I realised it, but there’s a particular riddle (no spoilers) that has two answers. Yes, two answers. Solving this particular riddle whilst playing, I thought how clever it was and how simple it was. I now realise the riddle was not intended to be as easy as we found it, for the answer they wanted you to find (the answer it gives you on the help card should you require it) is not the answer I came to but an answer that was harder to spot, something I only found moments ago looking back through the parts for this text. The thing is, both answers lead you to success. The correct and slightly harder to reach answer takes you to the exact same answer card as the other easier to find answer. I believe this was a bit of an error in game design, but a fun one non the less.
Overall, I think EXIT The Cemetery of the Knight is perfect for players who have had a little bit of experience playing puzzle games and want a challenge, and just as perfect for players who are well accustomed to solving puzzles and want something a little more easy going. My husband and I (He’s my usual escape room partner) had a fun date night playing together to uncover the answers. We love a good mystery and this particular EXIT game was just what we were hoping for.
My Own Playthrough Score?
Honestly? 10 out of a possible 10! In order to score your game, you need to time it, and count how many help cards you needed to use. There’s a chart at the back of the instruction manual with the scores, and for a perfect 10 you need to come in at less than 60 minutes with zero help cards. We hit 60 minutes exactly for our playthrough. This is only the second EXIT game we’ve ever scored a perfect 10 for, with five other games completed successfully without any help, and just four others completed in 60 minutes or less, and we’ve played almost all of the EXIT games released so far (33 at the time of writing this excluding the advent calendars and kid’s games).
Zatu Review Summary
Zatu Score
85%
