Postcurious’s delightfully illustrated The Light in the Mist follows in their tradition of narrative puzzle games. Designed by Rita Orlov and Jack Fallows (also the game’s artist), Light in the Mist is a 1–4 player cooperative deduction game in which you are searching for your missing friend Sam employing… a tarot deck… Well, why not? The deck consists of 22 Major Arcana cards, which form the core of the game’s puzzles, and 56 Minor Arcana cards, which provide additional clues. A few pages of the enclosed booklet talk about using the deck for tarot, but the game itself has nothing to do with cartomancy and divination.
Apart from the very first and very last cards, the remainder of the puzzles can be tackled in any order: the first is a gentle introduction to the game, and the final one leads to, well, I won’t give it away—and in fact, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers altogether in this review. The intermediate puzzles lead you on a wiggly path, gathering items along the way which will be necessary for the finale.
Playing the Game
Each Major Arcana card has an identifying symbol on the top, and you locate all the Minor Arcana cards with the same symbol: together these provide everything you need for the specific puzzle. Note that some of the Minor cards have multiple symbols, indicating that they are used in multiple puzzles. Once you’ve chosen the cards to work on, read the associated passage in the booklet, which provides a starting point for the puzzle.
The solution to each puzzle will be an English word (sometimes more than one), which has some relationship to the relevant part of the story. You convert the word to a number via a solutions table in the back of the booklet, directing you to a few paragraphs of story in the main section (a bit like reading one of those choose-your-own-adventure books), which will tell you a bit about Sam and the relationship between the pair of you, as well as providing the occasional item to add to your collection—rather, the name of an item to note down for later.
The booklet is a little spoilery; specifically, the word lookup table at the end shows all the words that can be solutions to the puzzles, and I confess that there was one puzzle that I ended up ‘brute forcing’ by just seeing which words could possibly fit the puzzle and working backwards. As an alternative, you can visit a page on the Postcurious website (details in the booklet) which provides a text box for you to enter your solution word to get the number, without seeing any of the other words. This web page also offers hints to each puzzle, should you need them, and will tell you how many solutions each particular puzzle has.
The final component in the game is the ‘backpack’—a card envelope on which you record items you’ve found, and which you open when told to. I really can’t say any more about it without giving too much away, except that you can download a PDF from the website to replace the backpack for players coming after you. Or, as I did, to avoid opening the backpack in the first place—I just can’t bring myself to make a permanent change to any game (legacy games make me shudder). But don’t look at the file until you get to the point at which you’re told to open the backpack! I also scribbled my items on a separate scrap of paper instead of defiling the backpack.
The puzzles come in a range of complexity and type: there are word puzzles, pattern finding/matching, geometric and number puzzles, among many others. Most of them are fairly compact, easily playable while you’re travelling, though a few need a fair amount of space to lay the cards out in particular patterns. If you find something not to your taste, you can drop it and try something: the story in the booklet handles order effects nicely—where you need to have both X and Y to progress to the next step, the relevant passages contain branching statements to handle the case where you have X but not Y, or vice versa. However, you do eventually need to solve every puzzle in order to complete the game, and perhaps this is an argument for having multiple players instead of playing the game solo: more heads and all that stuff. It’s definitely very satisfying when you complete the last puzzle.
A postscript to the game: when I was done, I did notice that there were a few words left over in the solutions list; this should have cued me to look for other puzzles, but I’d already done all the cards, and even found the multiple solutions for the relevant ones. All I’ll say here is (a) there are other places to look for puzzles that aren’t (just) the cards and (b) one of those puzzles relies on the solution to one of the card puzzles that you’ve already solved by that point, a particularly complex one as it happens—you’ll almost certainly know which it is when you come to it—so take a detailed photo of the solution (or be prepared to redo the puzzle).
Verdict
If you like puzzles, this is an excellent game, wrapped up in a small package. The artwork is beautiful and the story engaging (though I kind of skimmed it on the first pass, focussing on collecting items and getting to the next puzzle).
The game claims to suit up to 4 players, but I think smaller numbers would be better. If you were to split the puzzles up between people, you’d be missing out on some of them, and having more than a couple of people poring over the same set of cards could be awkward. (If you did split the puzzles up, you would have to make sure you’re not working on puzzles that make use of the same cards.)
A fair few of the puzzles are very moreish—as soon as we finished one, we’d have to do another, just one teensy-weensy puzzle more. However, there were a few that stopped us in our tracks, leading us to shove the cards back into the box in frustration until another day. As I said earlier, I did brute force one, and we did use the inline hints for a couple.
As with all such puzzle games, The Light in the Mist is essentially play once; you’ll just remember too much to make the second playthrough enjoyable. However, apart from the backpack, nothing is destroyed (and as mentioned above, you can avoid that), so you can easily pass the game on to someone else. You could, of course, just keep it for use as a tarot deck, but that woo-woo’s definitely not to my taste.
Ratings
- Overall score of 90/100.
- Artwork: 5/5
- Complexity: 3/5
- Replayability: 1/5
- Player interaction: 3/5
- Component quality: 5/5
Likes
- Wide range of puzzles
- Gorgeous artwork
Dislikes
- Can be frustrating at times
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
