As a family we love an EXIT game – they’ve become a modern New Year’s Eve tradition in our house where we order Chinese takeaway and make an EXIT title our last game of the year. This particular title sees us solving puzzles around Venice – a place we visited a couple of years ago – so this should be right up our street!
Introduction
This is a spoiler free review, so expect it to be lighter on specifics and more focused on overall theme and variety of puzzles.
As a family we love an EXIT game – they’ve become a modern New Year’s Eve tradition in our house where we order Chinese takeaway and make an EXIT title our last game of the year. This particular title sees us solving puzzles around Venice – a place we visited a couple of years ago – so this should be right up our street!
Introduction
This is a spoiler free review, so expect it to be lighter on specifics and more focused on overall theme and variety of puzzles.
If you’re not familiar with the series, EXIT games are essentially escape room-style puzzles in a box, and at their core they all follow a familiar approach to playing.
You have a pack of cards that’s split into a riddle deck, a clue deck, an answer deck and usually some other clue cards that you’ll need. There’s a decoder disk that used in conjunction with the answer deck confirms whether you’ve got the next part of the puzzle correct or not, and depending on exactly which title you’re playing, there’s often some additional “special pieces” on a thin cardboard punch-out sheet – The Venice Conspiracy has a single sheet of these. You also have a booklet that you’ll need to flip through to find various pages. Some titles are very strict about turning pages at the right time, others have everything thrown in there in a random order and it’s up to you to figure it out.
KOSMOS have a free app that you can download and select which of their games you’re playing. For EXIT games this means you’ll get some background atmospheric music, a timer that will run to calculate your overall score at the end and, if you want, a read-aloud of the initial instructions and scene setting. Speaking of which…
What’s the story?
Well, as you might well imagine, we are of course intrepid members of the Italian Secret Service but we hate our desk job (cough, cough) and long to be out in the field getting mixed up in all kinds of hijinks and escapades.
As luck would have it, we’ve applied for such a role and just as the game begins, we get the call that our powers of reasoning and deduction are needed immediately! Talk about good timing…
It seems a bunch of ultra-rich tourism moguls (who would have guessed…) want to release some aggressive plant poison into the Venetian waters, destabilise the subsoil, sink the entire city and “clean up in the disaster tourism market”.
So we best get cracking.
What’s it like?
There’s a predictable structure to EXIT games – 10 puzzles, each marked on riddle cards and other components with a geometric shape, so you notionally understand which bits are needed to go with which puzzle.
Each title also comes with a difficulty rating from 1 to 5, though the lowest rated game is actually a 2 – go figure. Anything 2 - 2.5 is my sweet spot. Venice Conspiracy is a 3/5 but as with all these things, a lot of it comes down to how your brain sees the information and the puzzles.
If you’ve played a few of these you’ll get a feel for the kinds of things you need to look out for, but typically clue cards have a few bits in bold or in colour coded text to point you in the right direction.
You can also delve into the clue deck if you’re feeling a bit bamboozled…
Give us a clue
Each of the 10 puzzles has three clue cards associated with it. A ‘starter’ clue, a ‘this is explicitly everything you need to think about’ clue and a ‘look here’s the answer’ clue. Or clue 1, clue, 2, solution as they call them.
It’s always helpful to do these in order as there might just be a spark that helps you see something in a different light to get going again.
If you’re playing for a particular score, keep the clue cards you’ve used to one side as they affect your star-rating for the game when you’ve finished. We house rule it that if a clue card is needed and it only tells us things we already knew, we ignore it – that seems fair I think.
So (how) do you save Venice?
Well obviously I can’t tell you that… but what I can say about the puzzles is there’s a really good mix of using a lot of physical components, deciphering things, logic and interpretation.
Predictably some utterly stumped us – this happens on any difficulty level, and I think it’s just indicative of how you see the information presented to you. Others we flew through and it’s a nice feeling when you’re on a roll like that, but can also make it feel stop-start at times.
What was interesting about this title in particular is that it felt like some clue pieces came out earlier than we needed them so there’s a need to focus on what’s in front of you in the story, and not take everything you’ve just uncovered at face value
Final thoughts
I’m not sure this was my favourite title I’ve played, but there were definitely some very memorable moments in it – some I’d really like to talk about here but won’t. But trust me that there are some terrific bits in here.
The story felt a little more contrived than others I’ve played. EXIT The Abandoned Cabin feels a lot more cohesive as a story compared to this where there was a wider arc to it, but being Italian Secret Service and foiling the billionaire baddies was comparatively in the background.
There’s a couple of caveats for our playthrough of this one – firstly not all of us were at our physical best, and a bit of a head cold will always slow you down. Secondly, I think 3/5 is probably my limit for difficulty without needing to spam the clue deck. I have no doubt you’ll be smarter/more logical than me, or just have a better feel for these puzzles than me, so your overall experience will vary.
If you’ve played some other titles before and you’re looking for a step up in difficulty then definitely go for this. If you’re new to the series in general, start somewhere else and come to this afterwards would be my advice. There’s definitely lots to enjoy here, and some incredibly rewarding elements when you solve them!
Zatu Review Summary
Score Zatu
78%
