Base price: $18.
1+ players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1

Full disclosure: A review copy of EXIT Kids: Midnight Spooktacular was provided by KOSMOS.

As promised, it’s been an extremely busy week of escape rooms and escape room games. The benefits of traveling for a vacation to visit my friend. I’m flying home at 8AM, though, so tonight is more of a summary event than anything else. I’m going back through, looking at what we played and what we did and trying to write it up. We played a lot of EXIT games. We played an entire suite! EXIT: The Circus Mystery, EXIT Family, and now, EXIT Kids: Midnight Spooktacular. So, here we are, going through them. I might switch things up with Wonder Bowling, since I picked that up at a local game store in SF, but in the meantime there’s mysteries to solve! Let’s start with one.

In EXIT Kids: Midnight Spooktacular, you’ve been transported to a mysterious realm of monsters and magic! Thankfully, every monster there is super nice. Nothing to worry about; they’re throwing a Halloween party! One of the girls needs a costume, though, and not just any costume will do! The other monsters have picked a costume for her, and she needs to solve their riddles to get the pieces before the party starts! That’s where you come in: you’re going to help solve puzzles and figure out these tricky riddles to collect pieces of the costume. The one issue that might come up is, well, once you see the costume once, that’s it. Can you remember what it looked like? Can you gather the right pieces from the wardrobe? And can you help her get to the party both in time and in costume? One way to find out!

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Overall, I had a lot of fun with EXIT Kids: Midnight Spooktacular is a great time! I was pretty impressed with this, especially given that we had some issues with The Great Bee-scape (though overall still had fun with it). While Midnight Spooktacular doesn’t have the particularly exciting and entertaining finale that Bee-scape does, there’s still plenty of fun stuff going on. For one, I haven’t seen a game feature a paper doll-style dress-up game at pretty much any point in my gaming career, and certainly not in an escape room game. There are some elements of paper dolls that aren’t my favorite, and I certainly hope nobody’s going to get weird about it, but it is very cute and fun, especially in the context of making a Halloween costume. There’s a memory element to that puzzle, as well, and that’s a fun way to build out the finale of the game and add in an incentive to replay. It’s generally nice, all-around. There’s something nice to games that make the distinction between horror as a genre and horror as a theme. Here, there are monsters, yes, but it’s extremely light and cute, rather than scary and spooky. Horror theme, not horror genre. Plus, I like horror-themed games a lot! They make for great Halloween plays without having to rely on gore or jump scares or anything that might make things unsettling. As you might guess, that wouldn’t fly for a kids’ game, but it would be funny if that’s the direction they went in.

Within the actual game itself, there’s a good mix of challenges, riddles, and tasks, which I enjoyed quite a bit, even as an adult. My personal favorite involves creating a spooky landscape and then looking at it to see what monsters are visible for the code. I like that style of art, generally, and it looks great here and is fun to assemble. This is another place where I would recommend following the order that the game suggests, though; the first puzzle is rather easy, and it’s a nice way to get familiar with the monsters and used to the process and the dial and the disk. If you’re a fan of hidden objects, patterns, or some cute object recognition, they’ve got that in spades, I think that some kids will really get excited about these, and there are plenty of interesting entry points where a parent or older gamer can help provide hints or some scaffolding for them to advance without too much help. It makes the game feel very intentionally designed, and that’s nice. Plus, I do like that they go through all the trouble of naming every single one of the spooky monster characters. It’s a nice touch, it makes the game feel more vibrant, and it helps kids latch on emotionally to the characters.

I do like the EXIT Kids series as an idea quite a lot, for similar reasons that I like MicroMacro Kids. There’s something to the idea that if you love a game series, you’d want to share it with your kids in a way that they’d get excited about so that they can grow into players for your favorite game. I also appreciate that it’s replayable, as opposed to the rest of the EXIT series. There are plenty of kids’ games that don’t need a version with more complexity (though ICECOOL’s older counterpart, Iron Forest, certainly was interesting). Here, you can draw a straight line from EXIT Kids to EXIT Family to EXIT proper (either the jigsaws or the advent calendar or the standard games) and it makes sense and works well. I would be interested to see how this plays with actual kids rather than jaded adults, at some point, but, I do have to play all of these myself to get a sense of how they compare. Plus, my friends are only recent parents, so even getting a test group together is probably a few years off. And my suggestions to my close friends that they have kids specifically so that I have an eventual test audience for kids’ games hasn’t gone over particularly well. Something about the cost of raising a child to age 18? But if you have kids and you’re looking to get them excited about puzzle games, you enjoy spooky games with low stakes, or you just dream of being an EXIT completionist (as I do, as well), I’d recommend trying out EXIT Kids: Midnight Spooktacular! It’s a lot of fun.

If you’re looking for your next mystery or puzzle game, check out my Puzzle and Mystery Games Hub for more great recommendations!

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