you discover links that you didn't think about before! It's a challenging game, but it's not too hard. If you take notes, go over all the materials more than once you will find the culprit! :) Thanks to the Studio Stamp teams for a fantastic investigation game!
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d assigning motives, because (without naming names) they usually 1) follow a somewhat predictable template (often withholding crucial information until the last possible moment, which makes all the work *prior* to that information feel useless), 2) involve a lot of letter-by-letter decoding with the same cipher over and over, 3) can get a bit nonsensical when it comes to explaining why things are encoded at all, and 4) in the worst cases, can involve a level of nitpicking (when assembling the timeline or comparing testimonies) that I don't find fun. So I was blown away when On Circus Grounds avoided all four of those pitfalls. The story was rich and elegant, there were no last-minute twists withheld from us, the ciphers were fun and varied, there were strong story reasons for everything to be encoded, and everything about the timeline and testimonies was signposted in a way that felt fair. Several times when one of us was reading the deciphered text aloud, the others would gasp, sigh, or comment on the beautiful story. It got a strong emotional reaction from us. That's not even mentioning the beautiful design of the components - the handwriting, the drawings, all of them were filled with little touches that made it feel real, made us handle things more gently. Would gladly recommend to both narrative game lovers and puzzle lovers.
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y so much passion and thought that has gone into producing it. I have not had the chance to get everybody together to play through all of it yet, so I'm afraid I can't give feedback on all the puzzle elements, other than they are some of the best quality I have experienced, It always makes you feel like you are really opening a grandparents old treasure box and discovering their past lives and scandal you had no idea about. After this success, I am looking forward to see what you porduce next. Good luck!
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e the real thing- documents, objects, photos, etc. Highly recommend this game!
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artwork and props were beautifully designed, and we appreciated that the game came with a refill pack so we could pass it along to friends when we were done solving the puzzles. Our only complaint was that the map was not part of the refill pack, and we wrote all over it - so definitely avoid writing on the map if you plan on giving the game away for replay. There was a nice variety of puzzles to solve, combined with detective work (notes and narratives to read to piece together the story). I’d rate this at medium difficulty. The puzzles were all solvable without having to look up any hints, but the storyline was complex so the game didn’t feel too easy. Definitely one you want to set aside a few hours for. Very enjoyable. Highly recommend.
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On Circus Grounds sets a very high bar for mystery games. You can read my full review here: https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/on-circus-grounds/
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. I recommend it. Very minor con, which may be a very minor spoiler (don't read it if you don't want to): At some point, the player must do a "chemical reaction" (let's call it like that) using (as explicitly asked) clean water. As a consequence, I used distilled water (possibly where things went wrong), with the end result being the wrong color (yellow in my case). As a correct identification is crucial for the mystery (even if it can be inferred tangentially with the rest of the documents), I got the wrong conclusion... until I checked online for it.
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ore from this company.
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zzles on a daily basis. Highly recommended.
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