I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a stack of mystery games about as tall as I am that I need to get around to playing. So I decided to start the new year as I mean to go on, and actually play one of them.
My game of choice was The Balthazar Stone by The Mystery Agency. I’ve previously played one of their other games, Ghost in the Attic, which I really enjoyed, so I was looking forward to cracking open another immersive and intriguing box.
I received this mystery box free of charge, but all opinions are my own. Here’s my full disclaimer.
The Balthazar Stone
Join Elsa Winslow in uncovering hidden clues and breaking Balthazar’s legendary curse. Crack the padlocked chest to begin your thrilling adventure to Sharkstooth Island.
Theming
There is something incredibly satisfying about opening up the Mystery Agency parcel. The exterior box is solid and doesn’t betray much about the inside. You open the top and find a newspaper, “Renowned Professor dead after making ‘strange’ discovery” blazoned across the headline. Then you pull out the packing straw and find… a box.
But not just any box. A chest, pleasingly weighty, sealed with a padlock and your first clue attached. It was so awesome that I completely missed the instruction to go to a webpage to kick off the game, and just set about reading the newspaper and figuring out some answers. So my top tip for playing this box – start with the website printed on the inside of the outer box lid! It makes a lot more sense!
Quickly you realise the game is set across a few different points in time: the 17th century following a young woman named Elsa Winslow, the 1931 death of the professor, and you solving it in the present day! You interact with not only the box, but also various webpages to piece together different parts of the story.
The box itself contains numerous fascinating artefacts, from aged treasure maps to a selection of corks and keys. Each one is meticulously crafted; nothing feels out of place for a box allegedly locked tight since the 1600s. Meanwhile, online you need to discover the URLs to multiple dedicated news and archive websites, giving a third (fourth?) dimension to this already very solid setting.
Puzzles
One criticism is that fundamentally you are solving a series of number locks. The puzzles are exciting and varied and interesting, but it comes down to putting numbers in a lock, and on many of them you can even guess the final number once you have the first two, so you could theoretically skip a third of the box’s puzzles. No true puzzler would take that shortcut, of course, but you could.
Setting that aside, let’s talk about those exciting varied interesting puzzles! I can’t give too much away of course, but let’s just say that treasure map isn’t just a prop! Nor are the corks, the features, the keys… every single item in the box had a purpose.
Due to the three-digit locks, you often had multiple puzzles you could work on at the same time. I solved the box with my husband Tim, and we would frequently be looking at different documents and figuring them out concurrently. Although there were a lot of times where having two heads on the same puzzle was a real benefit!
One of my favourite types of puzzle is a layered puzzle, where you need to solve one puzzle to get an input into a different one, which this game absolutely features.
We had the opportunity to use the hints system at one point, having gotten stuck on getting access to a particular webpage. Unfortunately, while the labelling of hints is overall good, we were a little confused about which stage we were on and saw clues to a puzzle we’d already solved. The hints automatically add time onto your final solution time, so it was a bit disappointing to lose 17 minutes for an answer we already had! However, I did like the multi-level nature of hints, allowing you to get a nudge in the right direction rather than just the answer straight away.
I wouldn’t call this a super difficult puzzle box, however there were definitely times where out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-treasure-chest) thinking was needed. Including our hints penalties, with finished at just over 1 hour.
Finally, at the end of the game there are full instructions to reset the box so you can pass it on to another puzzling fan!
Summary
An incredibly tactile and realistic mystery puzzle box, ideal for fans of pirates, curses or just puzzles! I wouldn’t recommend doing the game with more than 3 people, and you could definitely have an enjoyable time playing it solo.
Theme: 4.5/5 | Puzzles: 4.5/5 | Difficulty: 3/5
Clue system: multi-level hints system online
I received this mystery box free of charge, but all opinions are my own. Here’s my full disclaimer.
