CodeBreakers: Hunting a Killer (Play at Home)

‘They broke the fourth wall!’

THE INFERNO KILLER IS CAUSING HAVOC ACROSS THE GLOBE…

…killing innocent people, leaving dark cryptic puzzles and evading authorities.  Race against the clock in this online puzzle hunt to stop him before he kills his 9th and final victim!

Use your online sleuth skills to solve puzzles, unravel the mystery and hopefully find the infamous Inferno Killer before he strikes again.

We played the other CodeBreakers game, ‘Missing’ and enjoyed it so much that we instantly decided to do their second game, ‘Hunting a Killer’. It’s great to be able to play games from around the world, from the comfort of our sofa, and this was our second time ‘visiting’ New Zealand.

We enjoyed ‘Missing’ but in one or two areas it was lacking so we were hoping that CodeBreakers’ second game would have improved on those bits. We’re pleased to say it did. This is one of those games that you play and lose track of time, in fact when we finished we thought ‘that didn’t take long’, only to realise we had been playing for nearly an hour.

Like ‘Missing’ this game sets the scene even before you sign up, thanks to a short email from Agent Sutherland of the ADT Task Force asking for your help on the case. What followed next was a slick interface and a really rather enjoyable experience.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

Your first interactions with Agent Sutherland take place through the ADT’s messaging platform. It is just a chatbot in disguise but it does a good job of making it feel like you’re having a real conversation with Agent Sutherland as he sends you information on what he needs and asks you to help find passwords and locations. This chatbot worked very well and seamlessly redirected to where we needed to be.

CodeBreakers did a great job with this game and while many games will have you searching through Facebook to find clues (as ‘Missing’ did), they took it a step further here and just created their own version of Facebook. We see this as a plus as it means you don’t need to have your own Facebook account to play the game and they can also mould it how they want it.

Stepping away from the social media sleuthing which is now becoming quite common in online escape games, there was a good amount of more traditional escape room puzzles tying everything together. When you start this game it asks for your mobile number and make sure you enter this as it will be needed and adds a really nice twist to the game later on (works fine with UK numbers, and I’d assume others).

To help with the immersion there was a Spotify playlist that you could use, although we already have our favourite one that we use (Background Music for Board Games) which we listen to each time we play a game.

PUZZLES

As you would expect with an online game called ‘Hunting a Killer’, there is a lot of sleuthing around the internet, using social media, street view, and other real-world tools, but there is so much more that they have managed to fit into this game. The actual puzzles we encountered were logical and had a good amount of variation to stop things getting stale, although some mechanisms were very similar to their other game.

What was nice was that we could actually interact with a number of the puzzles and physically manipulate them, something we enjoy doing. There was one puzzle though, that we felt took this to another level, yes it was pretty simple but the result we got from it was wonderful – talk about breaking the fourth wall! Speaking of the fourth wall, this was broken more than once and each time it just added to the immersion of this game.

The game ends with a do-or-die situation where you have to choose who you think the killer is after sifting through all the evidence. Choose wisely…

CLUE SYSTEM

The chatbot doubled as the clue system so if you were stuck at any point you could just ask for help and it would be provided. We found the puzzles all pretty straight forward so didn’t need any hints but just to be through we went back and had a look, and yes, if you were stuck these would get you back on track.

One could argue that having the same chatbot giving you hints does kind of break the immersion and the realism of the game, but let’s be honest, this is an online escape room, not real life. For us at least, we like the fact that the hint system is self-contained in the system and didn’t have us dotting around the place trying to find another URL and document if we were stuck.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This was a really fun way to spend nearly an hour, time literally flew by! Some good puzzles and mechanisms meant we managed to be surprised on more than one occasion. The game culminated with a very clear ending and was nicely followed up by an email that brought everything together. The email also showed how long you were playing the game for, your final score, and your rank out of everyone who has played so far – at the time we were ranked 12th out of 388 so narrowly missed out on the top ten (I blame Liz).

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Device with an internet connection
• Facebook login
• Phone

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 51:21 minutes

Website: https://www.codebreakers.nz