Full disclosure: A review copy of Pandora’s Legacy was provided by TED Games.

Let’s dig in! I’ve been having a great week for gaming this week, so expect some games that I’ve been pretty excited to get to the table coming up, especially with Gen Con so close! Today I’m covering Pandora’s Legacy, an intricate escape room game with a lot going on, as is the usual for PostCurious. Pandora’s Legacy is a no-brainer for so many reasons. Love escape room games and love a puzzle, and PostCurious remains one of the best in the business. I’m excited to see they’re partnering with more places, and I’ll be super stoked to see how this turns out.

So, Pandora’s Legacy. You likely already know the myth of Pandora’s Box, but what happens after the box is opened? What will Pandora do? You’re about to find out. So grab hold of your fate and ally with the gods themselves to undo the chaos that’s been unleashed. What will the world look like once you’re done?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

You’ll kind of need to find out on your own! Open the box and follow the instructions; you’ll see what to do next! Note that you may want a tablet or a laptop for the game itself. It does work on a smartphone, but it’s a better experience if everyone can engage with the online component.

Gameplay

Pandora’s Legacy tells the story of what happens after Pandora’s famous box is opened up! Players take on the role of Pandora, grappling with the outcomes and the future. To figure out what’s next, you’ll need to solve puzzles, fix challenges, and try to set right what’s been set wrong!

There will be jigsaw puzzles, challenges, and tasks galore (galore being approximately seventeen), so dive in, solve the puzzles, and see what fate has in store for Pandora!

Player Count Differences

This isn’t the kind of game where you’re going to see a ton of different experiences at different player counts. Personally, I recommend having at least two people do this together because the puzzle is fairly challenging and the actual challenges aren’t necessarily slouches either, so having someone to help find and sort pieces or use the app to figure out what’s next or just split the work is ideal. Honestly, there are, at times, enough things to do that four people could happily work on things in parallel, which is fairly rare for escape room box games, so that’s always nice to see. There’s a linear bit, then the puzzle expands outwards to allow for multiple parallel bits of work. Beyond that, though, I don’t have a strong player count preference; I just dislike doing these sorts of things by myself, both because I do better solving puzzles with other people and I think the whole experience is more fun.

Strategy

• If you’re marathoning this in one or two goes, you should stand up every hour or so. This isn’t advice on how to win the game as much as it is strategies to prevent your body feeling like absolute trash because you lost track of time in The Puzzle Zone for three hours. I’m not a doctor, but that’s some good advice right there.
• The puzzle is going to vex you a bit; lean into it. The pieces are somewhat oddly-shaped on purpose, so don’t get too frustrated if the puzzle is taking some time to solve. Just lean into it, I suppose. Just keep in mind that the puzzle is intentionally a bit loose for escape room puzzle reasons, so you might have difficulty moving the puzzle at any point. Pick a spot for the puzzle that’s 40″ x 20″ at least and stick to it.
• You will likely need to do a bit of external research unless you’re an expert on all things Greek Mythology and, like, one Virginia Woolf thing. That’s very much part of the experience, and the game will explicitly tell you when it believes some external research might be required. Have a smartphone or your Greek Mythology Friend ready.
• You can tackle challenges in, essentially, any order that you’re allowed to do so; whether you solve the puzzles in parallel or not is up to you! We solved every puzzle as a team, but there are a few tasks during the game that aren’t explicitly challenge-related that can be parallelized. Split up the work to make things go faster?
• You may need to deal with the puzzle in ways you weren’t expecting, and that’s okay. I’m being intentionally coy about it but everything is the way that it is for an explicit reason, and those reasons will become evident as you play. Just roll with it.
• If you’re confused about something, use a hint! That’s what they’re there for, and there’s no penalty to using them. I strongly recommend the hint system. PostCurious has consistently done excellent work with making the hint system feel straightforward and not punishing, and the game has no penalty for using hints. They’re just there to enhance your enjoyment of the game and to sometimes get you out of a mental block that you’ve gotten stuck in.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• Love a Greek Mythology theme. It’s been a favorite of mine since I got way too into Age of Mythology in my youth. It’s too much fun and Medusas are cool as hell, so here we are. Now that Hades is one of everyone’s favorite games, it seems like we’re seeing a resurgence of Greek Mythology themes in video games. It’s been fairly perennial in board games, though, so I’m happy as a clam over here.
• There’s a lot of interactive elements to the game, which is really nice. I like the web interface, but I particularly like that most of the story text is duplicated between what’s in the boxes and what’s on the website, so multiple players can read and look through things or read aloud, whichever interaction mechanism works best for you. Some of the puzzle entries are purely text, others are click-and-interact interactions; it’s really a well-designed interface, end-to-end.
• PostCurious’s extremely thorough hinting system returns, which is a huge relief. I love escape room games but sometimes my brain just isn’t up to the challenge. That’s okay! We all get tired from time to time. PostCurious has a superb hinting system. Each puzzle has a bunch of hints, from the basic setup to guiding you through the puzzle and, specifically, noting when the next hint has the answer. I like that a bunch, since you can hint through the stuff you already know and then find the hint that helps you bridge the gap to the breakthrough.
• I appreciate that the jigsaw puzzle is your map, your storybook, and your inventory, all at the same time. The jigsaw puzzle itself is doing a lot of work! Heavy lifting from end-to-end. There’s a lot of things to discover in there and you’ll continually find new stuff. It’s also particularly fun since there are a lot of references in the puzzle itself to various mythological stories, and finding them all is its own reward (and occasionally useful for puzzle reasons).
• There are a robust number of puzzles; you’ll really get your time’s worth. I mean, we spent ~15 hours working on everything. That’s a great amount of time for an escape room box, though it is a while to have a jigsaw puzzle out on your table if you have pets or particularly precocious children. Definitely a great time to have one of those board game tables with the cover on it, though I haven’t been able to use mine since half of it is covered with other stuff at the moment. Very useful.
• I like a number of the puzzles quite a bit. They’re not all my favorites, but some of them are pretty good! I’m always impressed with PostCurious’s puzzle design, and they continue to bring their A game. I think in general this is one of their more approachable puzzle boxes (along with The Light in the Mist), but the theme is going to land well with a lot of people.
• The game is repackable, just remember to avoid drawing on certain elements if you want to leave it pristine. There’s even a guide at the end! I generally don’t draw on escape room game elements or write on them unless there’s no way to avoid them, so I was pleased that my version of this ended up pretty clean. Currently planning to bully one of my friends into playing it next, so there’s that.

Mehs

• The initial jigsaw is kind of a front-loaded experience, so you’ll have to solve that before you can get to any of the escape room puzzle elements. With the EXIT jigsaw family of puzzles, for instance, there’s still a front-loaded jigsaw puzzle, but it’s pretty small and you can complete it pretty fast. For Pandora’s Legacy, the initial puzzle took three of us about six hours of work (with a few breaks for snacks).

Cons

• The jigsaw puzzle element is, by design, a little fiddly, which comes with its own problems. It’s extremely cool, but, as you’ll likely notice as soon as you look at any of the pieces, even after you’ve finished constructing the jigsaw puzzle you’ll need to occasionally extract pieces from it for reasons. You need to be able to do that pretty easily, so the puzzle pieces fit together pretty loosely. This means you pretty much cannot transport the puzzle once it’s set up. Trust me; we tried, and it went fairly poorly. It lives where we’re leaving it, at this point. The puzzle takes a while to do. The game indicates this during setup that you should set it somewhere where you’re comfortable leaving it, but the game still takes a while to play, which may leave you wanting for table space. Play this one at home, not at a game store. You’ll need to move it and it will come apart in a non-optimal way, which will take time to fix.

Overall: 9 / 10

Overall, Pandora’s Legacy is excellent! I’m doing my absolute best to avoid spoiling anything for you all, but that’s less that I’ve been explicitly asked to avoid spoilers (though I have) and more that I really want you to get a chance to experience this for the first time. Now, even as an avid jigsaw puzzle guy, the initial puzzle assembly absolutely vexed me. This happened for a few reasons. For one, we were playing it at Mox Boardinghouse, which was explicitly not recommended by the game. Whoops. That’s okay, I thought; we can just move it. Unfortunately, due to the way the puzzle is constructed and meant to be interacted with, it’s extremely difficult to move safely. Cut to me having a lot of anxiety during the process (and buying a puzzle roll on the spot from Mox, whoops). I didn’t expect the puzzle to be so rickety, so please heed my warning and don’t do that. That all said, even without that, it’s a challenging puzzle to assemble, which is a lot of fun. The pieces have a lot of genuinely weird shapes. Puzzle fiends will love that, you weirdos. (It’s okay; I’m a weirdo also.) Once you get into the escape room game portion of it all, you’ll find that PostCurious has once again shot for approachability and, unsurprisingly, landed perfectly on the mark. I think this might be an easier game than The Light in the Mist, from a pure puzzle standpoint, but then you’re making me choose between two of my favorite themes: Greek Myth and Tarot. The web app is easy to use and engaging (and mobile-friendly, as of writing!), though I’d recommend putting it on a tablet or laptop during the game unless you want one player to be in charge of everything. The puzzles cover a wide variety of types and genres, and even when external knowledge is required you have the advantage of PostCurious’s superior hint system to let you have as much of a challenge as you’d like. I think where Pandora’s Legacy succeeds is exactly that: you have the ability to calibrate the experience to the difficulty and the pacing that you want. This means that every puzzle lets you feel like the Big Brain who solved it, rather than forcing you to acknowledge that the designer is just a better and smarter person than you are. It’s a well-scoped and well-designed experience (as well as a genuinely expansive one), and my only regret is that I’m passing the game along to another puzzle weirdo so I can’t frame the puzzle on my wall as a testament to the experience. Pandora’s Legacy deftly threads the needle of being both intense and approachable, and if you’re looking for a one-of-a-kind puzzle game experience, you like myth and legend, or you just want a weird jigsaw puzzle, I’d definitely recommend checking it out!

---

If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!