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Review: Wacky Wheels Mystery Games: The Mysterious Case of the Dancing Mania

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 Wacky Wheels Mystery Games:  The Mysterious Case of the Dancing Mania Published in October of 2022 (we, here at The Voynich Times mysteriously grabbed an early copy), The Mysterious Case of Dancing Mania is the first issue in a new quarterly Mystery Puzzle Game magazine from Wacky Wheels in the Netherlands! It calls itself, “A mystery story puzzle game” and combines story, mystery, and..you guessed it…puzzles!   We here at the Voynich Times have really wanted a Mystery Puzzle Game subscription magazine for a long time, so we were so excited to have used the mystic arts to find this item! So…did it stand up to our expectations? Did we love it? Did we hang our heads in shame for failing every puzzle?  Did we use it as kindling for our fireplace?  Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Let’s discuss the product first!   Wacky Wheels Mystery Games was created by a group of mysterious folks whose website ends in “.nl” which we can only imagine means that they are from a country that i
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The Viridian Room

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The Viridian Room is an online escape room game that is the direct follow-up to Takagi's original  Crimson Room, which is often considered the first Escape Room video game (although M.O.T.A.S. really deserves that recognition ). Viridian Room was released around May of 2004, just several months after the Crimson room. In this sequel, you have escaped the Crimson Room with just a CD case left and you enter an even stranger new room in total darkness. From there you must not just physically escape the room, but help a spirit move on and escape, too. The graphics and gameplay are a small step forward and it has some neat gameplay for the time-period. My biggest problem with this game, though, is it suffers from having a few too many puzzles that are not sign-posted or required you to go revisit and re-click or multi-click on previously clicked things for no real logical reason. The level of difficulty was higher than the first game and I did enjoy it, but needed the walkthrough
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MOTAS - The Mystery of Time and Space

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Mystery Of Space and Time (MOTAS)   You wake up with no memory in, what could be your bedroom... You have agreed to have your memory wiped by the Observers of space and time.  Only by doing this can you understand the deeper structure of the universe...for you are a human who can see another parallel reality.  Unfortunately you don't remember the agreement since your memory was wiped. It seems to learn more, you must first escape the room you are in...  MOTAS is one of the earliest puzzle-adventure/escape room types of video games, and would go on to influence future games such as Crimson Room (often considered the original escape room game) that would, in turn, influence the entire escape room industry!  Created by Jan Albartus using Macromedia Flash, it started as a single room in November of 2001 and has since expanded to 20 levels! MOTAS focuses mostly on the puzzles versus the story.  It is about completing (escaping) from each level to get to the next level.  MOTAS builds upo
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The Original(ish) Escape Room Video Game: Crimson Room Reviewed!

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Crimson Room "I drank too much last night.  I thought what time it was now. I felt thirst of the throat. The bed was different from usual. Is this a hotel? No, it does not seem like a hotel. I am shut up. I have to escape."  -- opening of the Crimson Room The Crimson Room is one of the first graphical video game escape rooms and considered to be one of the most influential for the genre.  It was released 04 Mar 2004 (1) and built on Adobe Flash.  The game was developed by Toshimitsu Takagi and was inspired by the graphical game MOTAS and the games Chasm and DROOM. (2)   The music and sound effects were by Oto-Jiten (Datacraft Co., LTD.) (2)  It was also preceded in 1988 by the text adventure escape room game Behind Closed Doors .   The story is a simple escape story...I woke up in a crimson room, apparently after drinking too much and having lost some memory (possibly due to the drinking?).  The room is locked and I need to get out. The room was obviously built to be escaped
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The Puzzlemaker Chronicles: An Interview With.... Chris Leigh!

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  Lessons From the Kickstarter:  Airmail Adventures By Brent Price (and interviewing Chris Leigh) Chris Leigh is an avid gamer and role-player, creator of a set of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition condition chips and the Tome of Spell Holding; and a gamer who hoped to take his love of games to launch his own mail-based at home mystery game.  Chris launched a Kickstarter called “Airmail Adventures: The Lost Journal of Flintlock Flynn.”  Designed as an at-home mystery puzzle experience, it was kid-focused, planned as 6 episodes, and used paper components, maps, a compass, a journal, letters., and more to take you on an adventure stemming from a family secret!   After sending several prototypes out for reviewers, the game went up on Kickstarter on May 2nd of 2019, and was cancelled on May 30th, having only achieved 31% of the required funding.  Always curious as to the experiences of creators and how we can learn from them all, I decided to interview Chris about his experience, and he w
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Voynich Reviews The Vandermist Dossier!

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  Review:  The Vandermist Dossier (spoiler free) You are the one who can help solve the mysterious disappearance of Abigail Vandermist! You receive a desperate letter from her sister, Helena, in the hopes that you are the one who will help her solve this personal disappearance...a case that has yet to be solved...a case that will take your special set of skills to crack... The Vandermist Dossier is the first part of a planned trilogy of Mystery Puzzle Games by Diorama Games (formerly known as Puzzlepost).  I received an early release review copy.  The final version is expected to be functionally the same, but with some upgraded artifacts. Bottom line The best praise I can give this game is that I will be first in line for the two upcoming sequel games! From the story, to the puzzles, to the quality of the components, this is the exact type of game that I love! The Vandermist Dossier The game comes in an actual file-box filled with documents and items from the case, including an old fo
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Mystery Puzzle Games and their Origin From….Poe? (Or, what was the first Mystery Puzzle Game?)

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  Mystery Puzzle Games and their Origin From….Poe?  (Or, what was the first Mystery Puzzle Game?) Note: This article was originally published on ESCAPETHEROOMers and is a combination and expansion of some of the article originally posted at Voynich. Please visit for many amazing articles and reviews! https://www.escapetheroomers.com/articles-perspectives Mystery Puzzle Games (MPG) is one of several terms used to describe an explosively growing hobby full of armchair detectives, ghost hunters, treasure seekers, and solvers of puzzles and mysteries…a hobby the traces its origins back to Edgar Allan Poe with roots leading back further into ancient cryptography, Detective Fiction, and the history of puzzles.  There are other viable terms and names, but for consistency, Mystery Puzzle Game is the terminology these articles will use. Defining this hobby can be as simple as knowing it when you see it, and as difficult as slicing through multiple overlapping Venn diagrams.  There is disagree
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