u/Buchkaeufer7476

I stumbled across PostCurious last year during the Kickstarter campaign for Pandora's Legacy. Since then, I have played through every game from their catalogue and had a blast. Their games are on the pricier side and I read from several people online that bounced off of their games, or were not sure if they were worth the higher price. This post is intended as a guide for those that are curious to get into PostCurious' games, but are unsure where to start.

What is PostCurious?

PostCurious offers puzzle games that fit the escape-room-in-a-box genre. Each game contains a number of puzzles that need to be solved to progress through a background story. As is typical for games of this genre, there is little replay value, but the games do not require destroying any elements for solving the puzzles (and refill kits are provided free of charge if you do like scribbling on them), so you can pass them along to a friend after you finished playing.

The unique selling points that set PostCurious apart from the competition are:

• Physical Artifacts. This is also the reason for the high price point. PostCurious games include gorgeous physical artifacts. Not only do they help tremendously with setting the mood for the game, they are often incorporated in really interesting ways into the puzzles, creating a great amount of variety.
• Story-driven. Almost all of their games have a strong narrative focus. If you like your puzzles being delivered alongside a good story, this is for you. The writing is often top-notch and we found that it makes the puzzling much more enjoyable.
• Puzzle design. We played several other escape-room-in-the-box games before, but found the puzzle design of PostCurious to be on another level. We did not encounter a single puzzle where we felt that the solution was far fetched or illogical. We almost never needed to use the (rather excellent) hint system.

What is the playing experience like?

This is based on our personal experience, your mileage may vary, obviously.

We found the ideal party size to be 2 people. Playing solo is possible, but having two players with different approaches to puzzle solving makes it less likely to get stuck. For example, one player may be particularly good at logic puzzles, another may be better with language. We don't recommend playing with more than 3 people, as bigger groups mean less puzzle solving for each individual player.

The puzzles are what I would call high-friction. PostCurious games do not have a time limit and that is for a reason. Expect tough puzzles were the solution is not apparent at first sight. Give yourself time to think about a puzzle. If you get stuck, let it rest for a night or two before reaching for the hints. Do not take shortcuts to wrap up a section of the game because you are running out of time in a game session.

We found that solving these games too quickly ruined them for us. We only used the hints when we felt truly stuck with a puzzle, even after thinking about it for several days (which happened only three times across all their games for us). Fortunately, the hint system is structured in a way that it will give you just enough information to help you get unstuck without spoiling the whole puzzle.

High friction does not mean unfair. The puzzle solutions are always logical and the game does a fantastic job at guiding the players through them. Other games often left us frustrated when a puzzle was being needlessly obtuse. With PostCurious we always had the feeling that the game gave us everything required to solve a puzzle and the solution was always clear and logical. We needed some time to allow ourselves to trust the games on this point, but once we did, our puzzle solving experience became so much more enjoyable.

What is the recommended playing order?

Again, based on our personal experience, feel free to disagree. But here's my recommended order.

--- Games to start with ---

* The Light in the Mist - If you want to get a good feel for the style of puzzles that await you with PostCurious, start here. Don't be fooled by the small box, this game is absolutely packed with puzzles. The puzzles can be solved in any order, so if you get stuck, you can try your luck with a different puzzle in the meantime. There is a great variety in style and difficulty of the puzzles, and they were all a blast to solve. We only needed one very small hint throughout our entire playthrough, which is a testament to the quality of the puzzle design, considering the variety. The story is well-written, but the non-linear narrative style may put some people off. The only downside we found with this game is that it does not rely as heavily on physical artifacts as some of the others. This is one of the less expensive boxes, and probably the best offer in terms of puzzles-per-dollar in their catalogue. If you find that you don't like the experience at all, it is safe to assume that their style of puzzles is not for you.

* The Morrison Game Factory - This was our favorite game. If you are an experienced puzzler, feel free to start with this one, otherwise we recommend TLitM first. It has the best story of all their games, wonderful physical artifacts and creative and memorable puzzles. It was simply a complete joy all around. This game requires reading large portions of text from a website to progress through the story. Don't let that put you off though, the writing is phenomenal and the story is engaging and wholesome in a very unexpected way. We loved every minute of it. This is also one of the smaller boxes, so it's a great sample of what their games are like without having to spend unreasonable amounts of money upfront.

--- The Big Boxes ---

These games are the flagship of the PostCurious brand: Big, pricey boxes filled to the brim with puzzles that will take you hours to solve. If you liked the two games above, consider spending more time with one of these.

- The Emerald Flame & Emerald Echoes - These two are part of a series. We recommend playing them in order, to get the best storytelling experience. We found Flame to be a little more difficult than Echoes though, so if that worries you, feel free to play them in reverse order, as the story dependencies are not that strong. Flame requires some internet use for play, but Echoes is completely offline, including a very impressive offline hint system. Both games make excellent use of incorporating physical artifacts into the puzzles in interesting ways and come with a compelling story with light ARG elements. These are probably the most representative of the core PostCurious experience, so we recommend your first big box be either of these.

- Pandora's Legacy - A 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, that contains dozens of smaller puzzles. This is the most linear of the PostCurious games, but the way that it incorporates the jigsaw into the other puzzles is truly unique. While the linear nature means you won't be able to switch puzzles if you get stuck, it gives a great sense of progression, which is very rewarding. With the exception of one puzzle that was too convoluted for us to figure out, we were able to complete the entire thing without hints. It did require many sittings with breaks to think about the puzzles in between. You will need a big table to leave the puzzle on between plays. We found this to be lighter in terms of story than most of the other games, as the story is mostly short rehashings of various tales from Greek mythology.

- Threads of Fate - This is PostCurious' oldest game in the list and it feels like a less refined version of Emerald Flame. This is the most difficult game in their line up by far and we don't recommend starting with it. If you finished the Emerald games and are hungry for more puzzles and a steeper challenge, give it a try. It's still an excellent game on its own, but in direct comparison with the other games, we found that it showed its early origins.

--- The Smaller Boxes ---

These are smaller games, which are not as expensive as the big boxes and don't require as much time to complete. For the games above, we would recommend playing them in the order listed, but for these smaller ones, you can play them in any order in between the big ones.

- The Ministry of Lost Things - The second game in the series is not yet released at the time of this writing, so we only played the first. The game is a little lighter in terms of physical artifacts. Almost all artifacts were paper based, which may sound boring, but the amount of variety that the game takes out of these paper-based puzzles was delightful. We were never bored and while the story is a more cute and lighthearted than what you would expect from the bigger boxes, it did embellish the experience.

- Adrift - While this comes in a bigger box, it is not much longer than Ministry of Lost Things. The puzzles are unique and fun and the theme of mystical nature ghosts is delivered very well through gorgeous artwork. But there is not much here in terms of story, so only play this if you are in it for the puzzles.