Playing the Game

So what do you get? Again, it’d be a spoiler to even describe it to you; other than to say nothing is meaningless. I was astounded by the skill and effort put into coming up with so many bespoke and wonderful components. And I’m not talking about the structural quality, which is fine, I mean the immersion and sense of place. These things actually look and feel like weird items taken from someone’s apartment.

Some items are overtly cryptic, others may appear meaningless or like they exist strictly for narrative purposes, only to become immensely important later on as you stumble upon some revelation. In our group of three, we went through each item as a group and then naturally gravitated to individual items that each of us would turn our attention to.

This is one of the biggest strengths of the Tale of Ord; even though there is a grand mystery within each chapter, individual puzzles can be solved in parallel. Countless times over our first session, one of us would loudly exclain “guys, guys! Check this out” and we’d excitedly detail a theory for the others’ consideration. Often this led nowhere, but with each attempt, new connective tissue was uncovered. What if the cards mean this? What are those weird numbers? Isn’t this formatting strange?

Our excitement was further compounded when we realized that our freedom to explore beyond the components of the game wasn’t just possible, but was encouraged. The puzzle has a few really smart moments that have you utilize a device connected to the internet, and you begin to see that many of the things referenced in the game are from the real world. Not only did looking into the subject matter of our missing archaeologists help contextualize some of the clues on the table, it did a fantastic job of immersing us in this fiction; we used real world tools, rather than arbitrary game rules, to complete our adventure.

Throughout the three hours it took us to tackle episode one, numbers, ciphers, patterns, metaphors, codes, they all begun to reveal themselves, sometimes leading us to new tools that would let us crack another puzzle, or give us one of piece of the chapter’s overall solution. In both episode 1 and 2 there were each at least three moments that felt like it completely blew the case wide open, offering a deluge of new possibilities to explore. And all of that is great, if you are successful...