A Great Intro – Review Geek

If you’re unfamiliar with Hunt A Killer, it’s an immersive murder mystery game you can play alone or with friends. Each murder mystery contains six “episodes” or boxes that make up a complete story, delivered to your doorstep monthly.

For an entire season, or six boxes, it costs $195; because six boxes over six months make up a complete murder mystery from start to finish, this is Hunt A Killer’s most popular option. However, you can also purchase a quarterly membership that renews every three months for $99 or a full-year membership (with two murder mysteries to solve) that costs $360.

With every box, you’ll receive more clues, paperwork, and the occasional special physical item, like a locked box or some other kind of prop. You use these clues to piece together the mystery and ultimately find the culprit by figuring out who had the means, motive, and the opportunity to commit the crime.

Almost everything you find in the game box is paper, though there’s also a prop tea strainer, a ring, and a locked metal box you could use later as a pencil case or something similar. Because many of your clues and case info come from separate pieces of paper, you’ll need a lot of surface area to spread everything out before you get started.

While I was solving the mystery, there were quite a few times when I needed to reference multiple documents at once, so it’s best to have everything where you can see it instead of keeping things stacked on top of one another. There are some papers you can set aside while you’re investigating, like the solution envelope and the introductory letters, but you’ll want to keep track of where they are to reference toward the end of the game.

Despite having so many papers to look at while investigating your case, it’s super simple to figure out how to begin. The game recommends beginning with Nancy Drew’s letter to you, which tells you to start by reading her case notes and each character profile. After that, you can peruse the remaining documents in whatever order makes the most sense to you.

Mystery at Magnolia Gardens isn’t a typical tabletop game, where there’s a board, players taking turns, or moving pieces. Instead, the gameplay is mostly reading: not surprising in a game where you play a detective.

The game manual tells you which document to start with; from there, it’s a pretty simple flow of information. I’d recommend reading through everything, or at least skimming, before you start pairing documents together, trying to figure out clues, or ruling people out as the culprit.

The puzzles were simple enough to figure out on my own but challenging enough that I didn’t figure them out immediately. Actually, there was one puzzle I couldn’t figure out, but it didn’t end up being relevant to me accurately figuring out who the culprit was.

Although there’s an envelope in the box that’ll tell you who the culprit is and why they did it, there’s not a puzzle key for anything you can figure out. One of the pieces of paper mentions that you can go to Hunt A Killer’s website for hints and notes on the game, but you have to enter a passcode to view the materials, and I couldn’t find that anywhere.

It took me about two hours to read through everything and be 99% sure who the culprit was, but if I was solving the mystery with one or more additional people, I think we could’ve solved it in an hour or so. I wish the experience had been a bit longer, only because this is a one-time playthrough, and the end culprit doesn’t change. Hunt A Killer’s subscription mysteries are longer, though they are more expensive, so I wish the single-play games like this one were a tiny bit longer or maybe a bit more intricate.

I don’t want to give any spoilers away, so I’ll say that I enjoyed the experience and was proud of myself for catching the culprit. Playing Mystery at Magnolia Gardens was a short experience, but so is going to the movies or out to dinner, and you’ll often spend more money at the movies or a sit-down restaurant.

It’s fantastic that Hunt A Killer offers standalone games as a segway into its subscription boxes, so you can spend much less money to see if it’s worth it. Although I might not consistently subscribe to Hunt A Killer, getting a 6-month subscription every now and then would be an excellent idea for monthly date nights or family game nights. I can’t wait to try out more games from this company!