Society of Curiosities: Mysterious Map Heist

Society of Curiosities is a new by-mail puzzle subscription from the team behind Kauai Escape Rooms, located on a Hawaiian island in the middle of the Pacific ocean and "Mysterious Map Heist" is a short, free game they've created as both an introduction and promotion to the series. The full game is not available in the UK quite yet, but you can still play through this game as a demo of what should shortly be to come.

Gameplay is guided by SMS text message conversation with a character "Pip", who requests your assistance in the matter of locating a mysterious treasure map. You receive texts with information and hyperlinks to various online resources, and having solved a puzzle, or selected a course of action you reply with a text message response, prompting the next instruction. The chat is (mostly) natural and we had no problem with getting the chatbot to understand our messages and give an appropriate reply. The requirements to use SMS on a mobile phone as the primary game communication is a little bit odd, since a lot of the time the response contains a hyperlink that we then had to re-type into a browser on our PC, but it does add a touch of humanity to the interaction.

The puzzles are relatively unchallenging, but still satisfying and they flow very nicely - there's some logical deduction, maps, a few ciphers, and situational puzzles, and a very nice moment of interaction with a custom website. The graphic design and writing is high quality, and there has been lots of thought into little details like making the puzzles accessible (a transcript is provided of the writing on all visual clues, for example). I played with my family, and my kids aged 7, 8, and 13yrs old were all interested able to get involved.

Considering the game is free, this is a very enjoyable way to spend half an hour or so, and a very promising teaser of the full game from Society of Curiosities hopefully available here soon.

An amusing and charmingly done web-based puzzle adventure, with some cute online interactions and a good sense of craft and style overall. A little short but it's free!