Base price: $18.
1+ players.
Play time: 1 – 2 hours.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1 

Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT – The Professor’s Last Riddle was provided by KOSMOS.

We’re back with my ongoing series on EXIT games! I love writing these, love playing the EXIT games, and just enjoy the whole loop of it all. I’ve been doing more in-person escape rooms lately, and these have been great practice. There’s something to be said for the physical motions of actually trying to reactivate Tesla’s time machine or de-ghost an old haunted mansion, but you gotta work with what you have, and I’ve been consistently impressed with the Brands’ ability to package a near-equivalent experience in a, what, $18 box? It’s good stuff. Maybe I should start reviewing escape rooms. Thoughts for another time. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the next EXIT game: The Professor’s Last Riddle!

In The Professor’s Last Riddle, Professor Ian Jones has died! Fortunately (or annoyingly?), he’s left everything inside of a complex series of puzzles and riddles, promising his greatest treasure to the person who can solve them all. You’ve been asked to take on the Professor’s final game and solve it, and doing so will take you all over the world! Jones was a man of many places, and many people will help you along the way if you can crack the codes. So take up your trusty decoder disk and start working on those Riddle Cards. Are you up to the challenge?

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I think that The Professor’s Last Riddle is another great EXIT title! The thing you’re obviously going to notice is the balloon, so let me get that out of the way without spoilers. It’s a fun schtick, the puzzle around it is great, and it’s another solid move (even if we did make a mistake when doing the puzzle; alas). I was pretty pleased across the board with this one; normally, there’s at least one puzzle that I particularly don’t like, but the general difficulty wasn’t too bad and the puzzles were solid. It feels to me like the Brands are getting more settled into a general zone of puzzles, which is nice. That’s not to say that the puzzles are getting stale or samey, but rather, there’s an expertise to them where I expect a certain level of quality of construction and effect, and that’s pretty much always met, which is cool.

Thematically, it’s another EXIT game, which is, at worst, a convenient story structure to allow you to go places and do puzzles. This time, the theme is around an eccentric jet-setting professor’s will, so the structure of the game makes sense as you go to each place. The art is particularly nice in this one, actually; there’s a lot of vibrant puzzles that are specific to the “location” you’re in, which I thought was a lot of fun. There’s even a souvenir, though I will say that it works a bit less well once you’ve used it for its appropriate puzzle, which kind of makes sense. It might have been better to just include a second one in the box. There’s a surprisingly-unsubtle reference to my favorite EXIT game (The Catacombs of Horror), which I found delightful. I love when the EXIT games have some weird continuity. Where’s my Official EXIT Timeline, KOSMOS? I did appreciate that one of the puzzles only works in German (but it works really well in German), so instead of messing with a good thing they just included a German translation table for that puzzle. I laughed a bit, but, to be fair, it’s a really good puzzle. I love a good bit of puzzle construction.

This is all to say that, again, The Professor’s Last Riddle is another strong entry in one of the best escape room franchises currently on the market (second only, in my mind, to the incredible and bespoke PostCurious puzzles). Bespoke comes with a bit of a price tag, though, so I consistently love that these EXIT titles are less than $20 (usually); I tend to throw these into gift exchanges or just give them to friends who like puzzle games. I … get them new ones, though; these are still single-use puzzles. But if you’re looking for a fun puzzle to occupy you for an evening, you’re a die-hard EXIT fan, or you just want to see what all the hubbub is about, I’d definitely recommend checking EXIT: The Professor’s Last Riddle out! I’ve had a blast with it.

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