Hunt A Killer Reviews Round Up
A collection of NoPro’s thoughts on six different at home offerings
Have you been curious to give Hunt A Killer a try, be it a gift for someone or a treat for yourself? Are you a little overwhelmed by the selection, unsure which premium game or box set is worth taking a chance on?
Over the years, the NoPro staff has reviewed several different offerings from Hunt A Killer, from their low cost, single entry retail exclusives to their epic, six part box sets. Generally, the staff has loved nearly every experience, with simply finding some better than others.
Below you’ll find links to three long form reviews along with three complete capsule reviews. Hopefully they’ll help you suss out which Hunt A Killer experience sounds the most intriguing to try. Best of luck on cracking the mystery, gumshoe!
Editor’s Note: All prices are from the time of review, with being subject to change.
Blair Witch: Episode One — Hunt A Killer
$29.99; Remote (At-Home Box); Available Now
When I finally cracked open Blair Witch, I wasn’t disappointed. Sure, it was mostly paper-based — a pen and a charm bracelet were the attendant objects — but the graphic design was on point and the different paper stocks and sizes made it feel more like it was stuff, even if everything was freshly printed and didn’t have the kind of weathering that a high-end escape room would have gone to the trouble of doing — or had managed to achieve through lots of handling.
Without giving anything away about the puzzle design, which likely wouldn’t shock those familiar with these boxes or mysteries in general, I will note that the designers of this first episode pull off a neat feat. Each time I peeled back a layer of the central puzzle, a little bit more of the supernatural element was folded into the mix. Much like the original Blair Witch Project, I found myself getting slowly creeped out by what I was uncovering. At points I would solve a [redacted] and groan out a little “oh no,” or find myself hoping that what I was [redacting] wasn’t going say what I thought it was going to say. And then it did and… here come the willies.
All in my head. All from words on a page. A dance between two messed up imaginations at a distance through a medium of cryptic codes.
This type of thing is clearly targeted to the “play an escape room a week” set. If you’re reading this, chances are you either know, or are, the kind of person who used to do that in the Before Times.
Hunt A Killer’s Blair Witch can provide part of that kind of thrill, at roughly the price for one player at a room, but obviously can’t bring the whole package a room does. As an experience for one, $30 is fairly pricey. It gets a little bit more sensible for two — there’s a reason why one of the onboarding questions (before you can try and buy into this service) is if you’re doing this as a “date night” thing, working out to $15 a head. You’ll plow through the puzzles faster, but some things certainly felt like they were made for someone with three hands.
The time I spent with the kit was some of the most focused and centered I’ve been all quarantine. That 95% of the experience is analog is a big part of that. Centering on something other than a screen for chunks of time spread out over two days and a couple of hours (you set your own pace) was a welcome relief. And while I was pulled away by other obligations, at no point did I find myself feeling the siren call of Twitter beckoning me into its cursed woods. Which happens all the time when I’m dealing with content delivered via laptop and mobile screens.
Read Publisher Noah Nelson’s complete thoughts in his review of the first box of Blair Witch: Season One.
Curtain Call — Hunt A Killer
$99.99; Remote (At-Home Box); Available Now
Curtain Call opens with a letter from one Julia Adler who is trying to save her theater after a mummified body of a starlet from the 1930s was found in a trunk. She wants to keep the theater open, but the police won’t take the case, so she’s turned to you to solve the cold case and find out what happened all those years ago. To do that, you’ll need to sift through a variety of clues (the tactile element here makes for a great player experience) in each box where your goal will vary between determining the murder weapon, eliminating suspects, and finally — in the last box — discovering the killer.
Those are the main objectives in each box, and are the easiest thing to solve….Thankfully, the monthly box doesn’t stop there, and would be, frankly, disappointing if it did. Additional objects in each box have different and usually pretty obvious ciphers or puzzle elements to them that, when solved, fill in the details of the characters in the story.
The difficulty level of these ciphers feels pretty good at the start of the box. There’s an in-game resource that lists the ciphers you’ll be using throughout the season, which can be helpful for figuring out how some of the puzzles will be solved (and you don’t have to look if you want to figure it all out on your own). This choice helps make the game accessible to people who may not have participated in something like this before. The main problem here is that while the ciphers and puzzles are fun to play with, there aren’t any new ones introduced throughout, so you end up using the same ones multiple times.
I worked on these boxes with my wife and it was a nice stay at home date night activity. If you’ve got a roommate, partner, or other family member that you live with, this makes for a good time. There’s a sense of accomplishment on finishing a box and getting the right answer (which you email to an address that auto-responds with more story if you’re correct) and, at about 45–60 minutes to finish a box, it fits nicely into an evening without taking it over.
And for people who aren’t familiar with immersive work, this feels like an excellent way to dip a toe into the immersive pool. While I was solving the boxes, I discovered the popular Facebook groups tied to the game where participants can ask for help. More than that though, they happily share how they feel like detectives cracking the case, get dressed up to get in the mood for working on the puzzles, or show off their elaborate murder boards, complete with red string.
Read LA Reviews Editor Kevin Gossett’s complete thoughts in his review of the entire run of Curtain Call.
Dead Below Deck — Hunt A Killer
$31.99; Remote (At-Home Box); Available Now
In Hunt A Killer’s latest self-contained retail exclusive, Dead Below Deck, Rachel Veinson has been found dead aboard a luxurious rental yacht while out at sea. Her death was ruled an accident, but Rachel’s friend disagrees. The friend has collected all the evidence they could find, providing it to the player to identify which of the five suspects is the murderer.
On the surface, Dead Below Deck features all the tell-tale markings of what makes Hunt A Killer’s mysteries top-notch and incredibly novice accessible. From paper type to content, each document is well designed and crafted. Brochures, legal agreements, grocery lists, notes, and more ring true as documents the player could encounter in everyday life. Plus, I always appreciate how Hunt A Killer tells a murder mystery story without subjecting the player to violent and gory details.
In diving deeper, problems begin bubbling up. The suspects lack depth, the murderer’s motivation is fairly pedestrian, and without a strong narrative, issues with puzzle design emerge.
In one document, keywords have been replaced by symbols, but the code to decipher them is unhelpful, and the symbols’ inclusion becomes busywork, elongating the mystery for its own sake. Also, there’s one physical object whose one and only associated clue is painfully easy to miss. But the association between the clue and object forces players to make an assumption, and there’s nothing denoting this object is the one in the clue.
Dead Below Deck requires Hunt A Killer’s app, which is easy to use and navigate. For this mystery, there are recorded suspect interviews containing important clues, yet the app struggles to play them. Nearly every time I paused or rewound a video, it froze and wouldn’t let me play any videos. The only fix was to close the app and start a video from the beginning.
Dead Below Deck simply isn’t Hunt A Killer’s strongest offering and I’d recommend setting sail on another mystery in their massive and solid catalog.
– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator
Dead on the Vine — Hunt A Killer
$69.99; Remote (At-Home Box); Available Now
Hunt A Killer makes puzzles that are grim, gritty, and grownup. That’s what I thought, at least, when I grabbed six puzzle-loving friends, cracked open the case files to Dead on the Vine, and found… an argyle notebook and some wine charms? This was the opposite of gritty. It was, in fact, quite cozy.
After switching our soundtrack from the Law & Order theme to Murder She Wrote, my friends and I had a good time playing detective. Dead on the Vine’s production value is fantastic — the box is packed with heavyweight papers, textured brochures, and locked baggies.
The puzzles are plentiful and varied; everyone in my group had lots to do and nobody was left twiddling their thumbs. The clue-to-red-herring ratio is satisfying; details that don’t relate to the murder still serve up juicy narrative tidbits that keep the story rolling. More than once, somebody in my group floated a wild theory, only to have it confirmed by somebody else’s clue a few minutes later. I was impressed by the level of trust Hunt A Killer seems to have for its players. Knowing that the clues we needed would make sense if we just kept working together made for great (and satisfying!) collaborative gameplay.
Of course, some bits worked better than others. The narrative attached to this game’s solution was beyond cheesy, which cheapened an otherwise sincere story. Play is well-paced, but consistent action means brain breaks aren’t baked in and three hours of nonstop puzzle-solving (even when it’s engaging and fun) is borderline exhausting. Finally, I would have preferred the box not include tchotchkes. Younger me would have been charmed, but grownup me doesn’t need another wine stopper for the junk-drawer.
All things considered, I recommend Dead on the Vine to families with precocious tweens and a few hours to kill, anyone who wants to live their own Agatha Christie fantasy, and to people who really love wine… and possibly murder.
— Leah Davis, New England Correspondent
Murder at the Motel
$29.99; Remote (At Home Box); Available Now
This escape-room-in-a-box was everything I’d hoped for and more: a classic whodunnit concept woven into a slightly seedy motel environment with a highly produced trail of breadcrumbs to follow to the end.
The experience provided me and my partner hours of entertainment as we sorted through contextually relevant documents of all varieties: hotel keycard records, receipts and handwritten notes found in the trash, the maintenance man’s labor log, guest complaints left at the front desk, and so much more. The storytelling was so expertly crafted that the game’s puzzles never felt like puzzles; it was all just part of a day’s work for us, the detectives on the case.
The game is labeled as “medium” difficulty and expected to be solved in 45–60 minutes, which seems possible, but optimistic. As regular escape room players and puzzle solvers, my partner and I painstakingly examined every document and kept detailed notes every step of the way, frequently stopping to hypothesize before we’d even reviewed all the evidence. We never felt frustrated, but we didn’t skate into the solution, either.
It’s worth noting that we believe to have found a small-but-pertinent typo on one of the game components, and the partially vague solution left us with a few unanswered questions. That said, we were still able to successfully solve the mystery, and had so much fun in the process, that it’s easy to overlook these minor failures.
And while the game has no replay value for us, we’re looking forward to passing it along to friends. Most of the solving and deducing can be done without writing on any of the original documents, or, if absolutely necessary, be done in pencil and later erased.
These single-episode boxes can be purchased for $30 each — easily a good value for the experience. Whatsmore, I’m now convinced that the six-episode stories are also worth the financial commitment, too.
— Danielle Look, Denver Correspondent
Murder on Ice — Hunt A Killer
$195 for Six Month Subscription; Remote (At Home Box); Ongoing
Who killed figure skating legend Nathan LaPalma? Was it his protege? His rival? His jilted ex? The answer doesn’t matter. What matters is that the world of the catty skating rink is realized, the production is lush, and the chase thrilling.
Clues are delivered through vibrantly produced ephemera (“feelies” to PC game fans) and custom web interfaces. There’s a shocking verisimilitude at play; at least five different weights of paper stock were used in producing all of the documents, some with intentional print and scan errors. Writing, especially for an in-universe Twitter stand-in haunted by figure skating stans, reads incredibly true to life. The functional tote bag and shiny medal were the cherry on top for those like myself who love to nab a trophy from every production they enjoy.
The mission-based structure for each box gave a strong throughline to a potentially ambiguous starting point. Only one puzzle, relying on an unintuitive and somewhat illogical capitalization requirement, fell beneath the general high quality of the production. I almost wish it had happened sooner though. The hint page where we ultimately had to look up the answer was also dynamic and well designed, featuring totally unadvertised accessibility options such as audio transcripts.
With the second and third boxes, Murder on Ice falls into a comfortable rhythm. Each box highlights a suspect (an ice skating darling with some online skeletons and his closet and his overbearing mother in these boxes), and you try to do your best to clear them. While I was expecting clear exonerations to enable process of elimination, Murder on Ice surprised me and provided some ambiguity.
The one surprising twist is the building tension of the story. Having never played a Hunt a Killer box before, I had assumed we’d be dealing with one murder. While the rest of the cast lives for now, brewing legal trouble and emerging threats against other cast members complicate the story. As I’ve started to develop a working theory of the crime here at the halfway point, this is a smart move. Even if future chapters confirm my answer, I’ll still be on the edge of my seat. Even the clear villains, murderers or not, are lovable, and I’m rooting for them to hold on until the finale.
While the puzzles remain fairly interesting, I feel my enthusiasm starting to wane slightly with boxes four and five of Murder on Ice. This waning engagement strikes me as the pacing issues inherent to any murder mystery exacerbated by a monthly structure.
With box five, another character has come into prominent suspicion. But with a final box to come, I know there will have to be a final twist (and I can’t help but hope it will be my culprit of choice who did it). This being my first Hunt A Killer experience, though, I can’t tell if this is typical of their offerings, with the killer’s identity only coming into climax towards the end, or if this is off-kilter pacing.
Still, I remain eager and excited for the final box. The obsessive nature of a murder mystery, the increasingly ominous messages from an unknown party in game, and the new plot wrinkles all serve to push me towards a conclusion.
Read East Coast Curator At Large Blake Weil’s complete thoughts in his review of the entire run of Murder on Ice.
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