Hunt A Killer is an episodic mystery game where you attempt to solve a murder. Lady Skkra and I played through one, and we definitely got hooked. If you’re looking for a game to play with a friend or spouse, this is perfect. Each episode only takes about 2-3 hours, depending on how fast you are, and how difficult that particular month’s box may be. It makes for a fun date night activity.
You use the objects inside each box to find clues and work your way through the case. There is an electronic component, where you log on to the detective website and see things like bulletin board posts, websites, or video (all fake/done with actors of course), and also correspond with the lead detective. When you’ve done your sleuthing for that month’s box, you send your conclusions via “email” to the lead detective, who will reply right away and let you know if you’re correct or not.
You can’t lose – if you get the answer wrong, you’ll be alerted that you’re incorrect and you can try again. But when Lady Skkra and I played through it, we worked extremely hard to get each answer right the first time. Otherwise, you feel like crap!
The puzzles are generally fun, and the harder ones took quite a bit of time to figure out, with nights where we spent a total of 4 hours on a box.
My only complaint would be that some of the codebreaking puzzles (there were several) are a little weird. Not sure how else to describe it. They were solvable (all but one, which we had to use the hints for), but early on, before we had a handle on how the game devs seemed to approach these puzzles, it was a bit tough. Sometimes a character would write something hidden in code, but in the plot of the game world, there didn’t seem to be a real reason to need to encode something, other than the fact that we as the players needed a puzzle to solve.
That minor gripe aside, I thoroughly enjoyed playing the episode we had, and look forward to the future ones. If you enjoy mystery games, it’s definitely worth checking out.