Swamp: The Kindling Hour (Play at Home)

Closure, at last.

Beneath the placid surface of everyday life a storm is brewing. You and your team must use all your skill and guile to evade capture, infiltrate the dark heart of a powerful organisation, and bring it down from the inside.

But who is the anonymous source trying to recruit you? How can you identify the true enemy? Who can you trust?

With every click they could be drawing closer, so you’ll have to think fast and rely on each other to stay one step ahead. Hack the system. Crack the codes. Find their weakness, before they find you.

The clock is ticking, The Kindling Hour approaches… it’s time for you to reveal the truth…

After Plymouth Point and The Mermaid’s Tongue, the Isklander trilogy reaches its thrilling conclusion. Infiltrate a powerful organisation, unravel secrets, and evade capture. Trust no one. Find their weakness… before they find you.

Back in 2020 and 2021, play at home experiences were popping up left and right, but some of the most memorable, engaging, and immersive experiences that we played were those from Swamp Motel: Plymouth Point and The Mermaid’s Tongue. I’m not entirely certain how we missed the conclusion to the trilogy – The Kindling Hour – when it debuted in 2021, but somehow we did.

Since then Swamp Motel have rebranded to just Swamp, and for a limited time only, have revived the Isklander trilogy, to surprise and delight puzzlers and investigators once again. Remembering just how much we loved the previous experiences, we jumped at the opportunity to book a session for The Kindling Hour, and finally conclude the story. Especially since our biggest complaint five years ago was the price, and now the games are available for a very reasonable price of £35 for up to six players.

The experience began with the invitation email. It wasn’t just simply a “thanks for booking,” but rather something that reinforces that this will be no ordinary game. Finally, the hour of our appointment arrived, and we joined the video call, under the guise of new members to the club, and prepared to infiltrate a secret society.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

As we’ve found with all of the games by Swamp, the less we say about them the better. The Kindling Hour is the third game in the series, and it really is essential to play the games in order, as the narratives are so closely intertwined. Thankfully for us, the game began with a recap of previous events – which was essential as it had been nearly five years since we were left with the dramatic cliff-hanger of a conclusion to The Mermaid’s Tongue, so I suppose if you book the games in the wrong order, at least you’ll have some idea of what’s happened (but definitely try not to do that). Swamp describe The Kindling Hour as a corporate espionage thriller, and it is definitely that. The narrative is twisty, full of intrigue, and plenty of drama, and even a little adrenaline.

The events of The Kindling Hour occur pretty much directly after those of The Mermaid’s Tongue, and if you’ve played the games in the order intended, then the format of The Kindling Hour will be quite familiar once the action is underway. Video conference calls are all too familiar now, and as the meeting got underway, the outside world faded into the background, fully immersing us in the events taking place on the screen.

The style of the game makes it so very easy to be swept up into the world of the Iskander Trilogy, and forget that you are sitting at home (perhaps in your dressing gown) as you become totally absorbed in the story, and even become part of it. The world building here is incredible, blending the real world with the fictional and creating an alternate reality for players to sift through. The bespoke interface for communicating with your team, and your contact on the inside, was exceptionally well designed, further reinforcing the reality Swamp have created.

Plymouth Point and The Mermaid’s Tongue took a series of dramatic twists, and The Kindling Hour was no different, crafting a dramatic narrative that we became a part of as we followed the story through to its final, epic conclusion.

PUZZLES

Like Plymouth Point and The Mermaid’s Tongue, the puzzles in The Kindling Hour don’t present themselves as “puzzles” the way we might think of them in a traditional bricks and mortar escape room. Internet sleuthing, social deduction, observation, logical deduction – it all plays a role. The whole of the internet is open to you, and while you’re guided to where you need to be, you may need to venture further afield to find the solution.

Of course, there were also a few other more puzzley puzzles, with some codes, ciphers, and symbols to get the brain moving, but these were few and far between, primarily because the narrative is the main focus of The Kindling Hour, and everything uncovered throughout the course of the investigation only serves to reinforce that narrative, and bring the story to life. In fact, the puzzles are so intertwined with the narrative, it’s hard to even say what is a puzzle.

CLUE SYSTEM

We met multiple characters throughout The Kindling Hour, but despite how seamlessly it is done, knowing that The Kindling Hour uses pre-recorded videos for these character interactions left us slightly puzzled as to why we had to book a specific time for the game. The reality is that while the video portions of the game are pre-recorded, any tips, hints, nudges or help you receive in the chat are not. Nor are these managed by an AI bot with some human oversight as other games of a similar style are. Instead, as far as we can tell anyway, your contact on the inside is a real person, there to guide you as needed.

Normally, this probably would present no issues, as players would most likely be in different physical locations, but on a video call talking to each other, allowing the host to know exactly what you might need help with. In our case, both Gord and I joined on separate devices so we could both access things and investigate at our own pace. But we turned the cameras and microphones off on those devices since we were sitting next to each other, and even leaving one on seemed to give us horrible feedback. Unfortunately, this made it impossible for our host to know what we had figured out, or where we might be struggling. So, pro tip – if you and your team are in one location, make sure the microphone is on for at least one device if you can.

But we still had access to the chat, and if we felt like we were struggling we could just ask for help. And, of course, our contact did their absolute best to try to ensure that we knew we weren’t alone, by occasionally popping through little tidbits of advice here and there, and even suggested we share our screen with the video call so that they would know what we were up to, ensuring that we never had to struggle along.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Kindling Hour was just as immersive and thrilling as games that preceded it, often leaving us wondering just exactly what was real, and what was fiction, before culminating in a thrilling  conclusion to a story we have been wondering about for nearly five years. It’s a shame that these games are only back for a limited time (for now at least), but if you haven’t yet played them, don’t hesitate to book your slot for any/all of the Isklander Trilogy.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Internet
• Pen and Paper (for note taking)
• Phone – capable of making/receiving phones call and text messages from UK

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: Around an hour

Website: https://isklander.com/

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience, but this has not influenced our review