Base price: $65.
1 – 6 players.
Play time: ~4 hours.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 1 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Key Enigma: Kalinasu Adventure was provided by Key Enigma.

I’ve really been powering through a lot of escape room board games, lately. It’s great and all (and goes really well with all the Tears of the Kingdom I’ve been playing) but boy howdy does it rattle my brain, a bit. Just a lot of mental energy to immediately turn back around and hit the reviews with. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a fairly intense regimen. Woe is me and all that. Readership seems a bit more divided on the whole escape room board game experience, which is interesting. Some of my most-read reviews are an EXIT game or two, but trying to talk about a wider set doesn’t seem to resonate with y’all as much as I would like. Alas. They’re fun to talk about, but I’ll also try to make sure some more standard board games get shuffled into the mix. I think Ra just arrived; that’s pretty classic. More on that later.

Anyways, in Key Enigma: Kalinasu Adventure, you’ve gotten yourself wrapped up in a mystery that’s going to span the globe! There’s treasure and pirates and heists and temples and mysteriously vague and violent groups that want to do something about at least one of those things. You’re, unfortunately, right in the middle of it, so you’ll have to stay one step ahead of them if you want to keep the treasure (and, you know, not die). Work with another scholar to uncover the missing truths and find the location of the lost Kalinasu temple before it’s too late. Do you have it in you to solve this mystery?

Overall: 7.25 / 10

Overall, I enjoyed Kalinasu Adventure! I’m a bit vexed, because while this game had some pretty excellent puzzles, there were a number of things that were missing polish or felt like a regression compared to Hack Forward, which surprised me. A lot of that was around scaffolding: at several different points in the game, we felt like we weren’t totally sure both how to start the puzzle and what the puzzle was asking for, so we ended up having to go hint by hint until we got pretty close to the solution (a somewhat frustrating outcome for experienced escape room game players). It felt like there was a gap between where we were and where the puzzles expected us to be, and that wasn’t always ideal. A wise person once told me that a great puzzle game makes the players feel smart, rather than just reminding them how smart the designer is. That was largely contained to Chapter 2, however, and I enjoyed Chapter 1 and 3 more than enough to make up for that. Chapter 4 split our group down the middle, though. I remain in favor of it, since I got to do most of the puzzles, but another in my group got stuck on a puzzle that was a time sink and basically took up the entire chapter for her. She was … particularly displeased that while looking at the icons I happened to solve the puzzle accidentally, but that’s more an interface criticism than anything else. For a game that makes heavy use of interfaces with a “SUBMIT” button, going for the ludonarrative consistency of suddenly dropping the SUBMIT entirely and just accepting the right combination as soon as it’s placed was an odd choice. Things like that negatively impacted our game experience, unfortunately.

That said, there’s also a lot about Kalinasu that shows why Key Enigma is an up-and-coming strong player in the space. I’ve really come to appreciate the conversational interface that they use for their games. Even though it really requires a laptop handy, it’s nice to feel like you’re playing the game with a chatbot or something that you can work with. It’s fun. Key Enigma games also have a very robust and helpful hint system, often showing visuals or partially-complete puzzles to help you along the way, which is great. They also tend towards robust puzzle experiences. I appreciate that Hack Forward was a spectacle, but even a four-hour escape room game experience is still pretty intense. I’d really call Key Enigma an enthusiast’s escape room game experience, as opposed to the EXIT games which largely tend towards a wider, more casual audience. They each have their pros and cons. If you’re looking for that enthusiast’s experience, you want to go a bit deeper with your escape room experiences, or you’ve always wanted to find a lost treasure, I’d recommend Key Enigma: Kalinasu Adventure! It was quite fun.

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