Online, May 2020
First of The Panic Room’s several CSI games, and one of the first online games to be released after the lockdown, Grounded is a murder mystery on a plane: one of the passengers collapsed mid-flight, apparently due to foul play.
The game’s initial page lays out photos of all the items which you’ll unlock in the course of solving it, as a kind of overview, and also as an aide to keeping track of where you’re up to and navigating between previous stages if you need to refer back. This was a helpful structure, and any potential for confusion was headed off by very clear up-front instructions. Also very good is the multistep hints provided for each puzzle, making it easy to get only as much help as you want when needed.
I was unimpressed by two early-ish puzzles, which look intended to give less experienced players a gentle start to the game but which seemed very arbitrary. The other puzzles were both more challenging and more satisfying, with a couple in particular that I liked. It felt like there were two distinct halves to the game, though: an initial set of escape room style puzzles needed to unlock the various packets of evidence, and then a murder mystery puzzle to synthesise everything you’ve found to identify the murderer.
Murder mystery puzzles are a matter of taste, and I’m rarely a fan. The thing is, to design a realistic-feeling murder mystery you need to include a host of details about the various characters, their motives and their backgrounds, what they did and didn’t do in the critical bit of time. Solving it requires sifting all that information and picking out what’s important, the one critical inconsistency or tell-tale fact. That’s utterly different to most escape room puzzles, where efficiency of information is a virtue and distractions left in to throw players off the scent are derided as red herrings. That doesn’t at all make murder mystery puzzles worse than ’normal‘ escape room puzzles, just different in style.
I was completely lost on Grounded’s murder mystery, with a feeling that the usual approaches I’d use in an escape room were of little use. My teammate, perhaps thanks to far more hours spent watching crime dramas, homed straight in on the answer without trouble. I can see this part of the game going down well with some players and not at all with others – a lot will depend on the expectations and assumptions you bring to it. It’s worth noting that the next two CSI titles in the series do not follow this style – if that’s a type of puzzle that doesn’t appeal, that’s a good reason to try Stranglehold ahead of Grounded. 
