Box One by Neil Patrick Harris

We found this one at a thrift shop in Ramona for $4.99, and I remember telling Anne, "I heard this one was cool."  She gave me one of those "you always say that" looks, but I really did want to see what was in this particular box.  It took a while to get to it with all the projects we have going on.

Quick note: it's not technically a "game".  The box clearly says it's a puzzle for one player.  But if it was just me trying to figure it out, I would probably have given up after the first half hour.  This will always be a better experience with another person helping to find the clues.


When you first open the box, it is underwhelming.  It looks like a deck of about 200 cards, a pen and a notepad.  You follow the instructions on the cards in order, and one of the first odd things you are asked to do is to put a special card in the freezer.  Sure, why not?  I figure some kind of message will appear.  Anyway, you sort through some basic trivia questions, and fill in some blanks.

Then it takes some crazy turns you would not see coming.  The deck of cards is not what it seems.  We did discover a few of the tricks early just by closely looking at the pieces.  But after a while, more clues are uncovered, and a secret compartment with more clues, and let's just say the box itself is a marvel of design.  It was never just a stack of cards.

The questions soon get you onto a website with a variety of images and videos as clues.  I was starting to get a bit irritated by this, since we play games to get away from the darn computers that surround us.  But we made it that far and figured we should see it through.

The content on the fake website was a combination of useful clues and time-wasting details.  This played nicely into a conversation a few weeks ago where I was trying to explain to Anne what an augmented reality game (ARG) was.  This set of videos and images was definitely an augmented reality where you instinctively question what you're seeing.  Then you have to look for clues under different kinds of lighting, captures frames and zoom in, and write notes on that little notepad.


It would be too easy to give away the main twists.  We were stuck for a while on Room #5, and started to get really annoyed.  And our contact on the site told us to come back in 24 hours, which was also annoying.  But we were stuck, so we did other things and tried the site again after dinner tonight.

I won't give away any clues, except that the view of the desk you need to decode the clue to Room #5 comes AFTER you talk to Marten a second time.  Don't spend hours on that one on the first day.



After that, the new content unwrapped very nicely, and the final response from the game was surprisingly personal and we felt good for having finished it.  This was followed by some playful banter and yet another hidden clue that had been under your eyes the whole time.  And a final bonus that was essentially a "hall of fame" page.  Nicely done.

Then it was time to put the whole game back to its original state, so that the next player who ends up with it will not know it has all been unpacked before.

What an odd experience.  I suppose this would fall under "escape room mystery games."  Others of this sort that we have seen had clues or props that get destroyed while playing.  This one could be all be put back together again, no pieces lost.  

We got really stuck and irritated, but the puzzle redeemed itself very well after that, and we ended up having a positive experience with it.

As an extra source of entertainment, there are dozens (probably hundreds) of Youtubers with videos showing their whole playthrough.  In some cases, having solved it, it was unusually fun to watch them fail.  One guy couldn't find the right password.  "It was on the fortune cookie paper, dummy."  Then he was holding the wrong card up to the light.  Funny watching these guys bumble through it.  We felt better about our minor errors.

A final dimension of amusement is over on Reddit, with a bunch of threads of users seriously overthinking every step and trying to make it into some huge thing that it was never meant to be.  I'm sure there are more responses every week from people who think all the clues should be read backwards, or if you play the cards in reverse you get some totally different puzzle out of it.  Yikes.

I will leave you with these words of wisdom:

"Anagrams are dope."   -- Neil Patrick Harris


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