Marvo Mysteries: M.A.R.V.O Archives Phase One (Play at Home)

Johnny 5 is alive!

‘Marvo Archives’ is an Online Escape Room Adventure Series. It is a brand new story to complement our physical Escape Rooms and is designed as the prequel to one of our future games! You will need to explore, find clues and solve puzzles using all of the resources available to be able to complete your objectives!

There are some companies whose rooms you don’t need to play to know that they are pure class; Marvo Mysteries is one of those companies. We’ve not actually made it down to Bournemouth yet to play their game but their reputation is so strong that we know it will be good (plus the owners are lovely).

When we saw that Marvo were releasing an online game (a couple of months into this pandemic) we assumed that it was because they had taken their time to make something special; we weren’t wrong.

We’d seen the trailers and teaser images online so we were expecting a different type of game to what we had been playing, but what we got was so different to anything we could have imagined!

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

M.A.R.V.O Archives is one of those games that straddles the line between escape games and video games, the key word here being video. There are some traditional interactions early on but once you get those out of the way things take a turn, and what a turn.

The more we interacted with this game, the more fun we had. Our first mistake was that we treated this like a regular online game, and it really wasn’t that. That’s the joy of online games, they can take escape game reality and twist it into their own reality.

The team at Marvo have a great sense of humour and they were able to get that to come through in the game. It wasn’t out and out jokes but just the way the game played out made it rather entertaining (DANCE!).

Everything you needed was contained within the game, the only time you needed to leave the interface was when it sent you pdf files that you needed to download and view. We didn’t experience any technical issues when playing this game and everything ran smoothly.

PUZZLES

The game starts off with a typical escape room puzzle which relies on observation and then a second which is also traditional. Once those are out of the way you start to enter the world of Marvo; and what a world. Part of the fun with the puzzles wasn’t so much in solving them, but working out what you needed to do in order to be able to solve them.

The puzzles that we encountered weren’t particularly hard, although they were still enjoyable, one puzzle involving an escape room favourite was particularly entertaining to solve. But to us, this game felt like it was lacking in the puzzle department. We were going through this game pretty slowly to enjoy it and take in everything and still finished it in around 36 minutes.

CLUE SYSTEM

We didn’t need to use the clue system as the puzzles made sense to us but they had an inbuilt system that you could use to decide how much help you actually needed. There were three different levels of clue, each one less cryptic than the previous, so one way or another you should be able to get through this game. There’s no timer, so if you do get stuck, just take some time to check everything you have and look at it closely and you’ll probably find the solution.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This was a good game, but it could have been great. We felt like it ended just as it was getting going and felt a bit miffed when it was over. It’s definitely worth playing as it is beautifully put together and is a wonder to behold, but I wouldn’t set aside much time to complete it.

The game sets up a number of things that you can do, yet you can only actually do a very small number of them in this game, I can only assume they’re going to come into play in part two (I really hope so). In a way it made this game feel more like a teaser for what is to come next.

Marvo are now offering a joint package where you can buy Phase One and Phase Two in one go – it saves £5 and gives a more complete game.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Desktop/Laptop
• PDF reader (you’ll probably have that anyway)

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 36 mins

Website: https://www.marvomysteries.co.uk/