Base price: $39.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~2 hours.
BGG Link
Preorder directly!
Logged plays: 1

Full disclosure: A preview copy of The Morrison Game Factory was provided by Postcurious. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

A new Postcurious game is like Christmas for puzzle nerds, and here we are, with two in the pipeline. That’s Christmas twice? Double Christmas? There’s no appropriate holiday for this, but dammit, there should be. Puzzle nerds unite and all that. Anyways, I had to wait on these for a while as I have a friend back where I used to live who I’ve done almost every escape room I’ve ever done with, and we’ve done all of these together. Emerald Flame, Light in the Mist, Adrift, Threads of Fate, all of the EXIT games, a bunch of actual escape rooms; you get the idea. So we spent a little over a week just digging through even more escape room games and actual escape rooms to test our puzzle chops. This was one of the last ones we did! So let’s dive in and see how it went.

In The Morrison Game Factory, family fun used to be the top priority! Now it’s a bit run-down. All the machines are off and the toys and games of yesteryear are no longer being produced, probably. Players take on the roles of explorers diving into the old factory and seeing what secrets await inside. Be warned: you might find more than you expect! Nothing scary though. It’s just kind of heartwarming. Are you prepared for … that? Oh, and the puzzles.

Overall: 9.75 / 10

I’ll be honest: The Morrison Game Factory was a tough review to write up, largely because I liked it just about as much as The Light in the Mist. It’s truly fantastic, and another example of why Postcurious is doing some of the absolute strongest work in the business around escape room / narrative puzzle tabletop games. While The Light in the Mist is an intimate journey through someone else’s memories told through the lens of tarot cards (my personal vice, thematically), The Morrison Game Factory is an exciting romp through the past in an attempt to save the present. They’ve got some nice overlaps in how they play with the idea of memory and experience, but the major overlap is pretty simple: these are damn good puzzles. They’re fun, novel, and inventive, with one of them even being a bit science-y? Trust me; you’ll love it. No spoilers. The only puzzle that didn’t entirely land for us was an audio puzzle, just due to some issues with hearing and the transcription seemingly autocorrecting some text when it shouldn’t have been, but, as usual, the robust hint system bailed us out.

I will say that it was a genuinely tough call between this and The Light in the Mist for me; my frequent puzzle collaborator preferred The Morrison Game Factory and I’m Team Light in the Mist, and I think that largely comes down to which theme resonates with you more, which is about the highest praise I can put in for a pair of games. While I always like the Postcurious hint system, here, it’s very specifically integrated into the game’s narrative itself in a cute and entertaining way, which makes the entire experience feel a bit more cohesive, strictly to the game’s benefit. I do think it would have been nice for some of the components to be a bit physically larger, but I think I just have ham hands sometimes so I tend to knock things over. Alas. Intriguingly, they also goofed us at one point with a puzzle that we only thought was single-use, so be careful with that. Beyond that, though, the standard Postcurious quality applies here. It’s decently reusable, there’s a lot of classy work around art, style, and graphic design, and the narrative was decently heartwarming in a way that we both really liked.

This is all to say that I think Postcurious has really struck gold with their Puzzletale system. I’ve played … five, I think, at this point, and thought they were all pretty great. Each one also does a great job of expanding the thematic scope of the company in a new and interesting way, and pushing against the boundaries of what I frankly thought you could do with an escape room game. Plus, all the boxes are super nice, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s a good box. If you’re a connoisseur of puzzle games (or if you can spell connoisseur correctly on the first try), you’re looking for a decent challenge, or you just love Postcurious as much as I do, I’d highly recommend trying out The Morrison Game Factory! It’s been one of my favorites that they’ve made so far, and I think a pretty consistent example of how Postcurious continues to be one of the best in the business.

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