The Light in the Mist ~ a visually stunning & challenging puzzle experience ✨ | Spoiler-Free Review

[Music] hi everybody I'm Amy this is my wife Maggie and together we are think of thema and today we're reviewing something a little bit different it's a puzzle tarot game yes by post-curious and designer Rita orlov and Jack fellows now uh why is this different for us we do dabble in the escape room genre we love escape rooms yes yes we like the actual physical Escape rooms that you go in and you physically have to make your way out usually within an hour but we've tried a lot um that are in the board game space as well so the Escape rooms in a box and this is kind of like that but it's not really an escape room because there's no time pressure but it's definitely an interesting little puzzle in a box so we'll tell you more about it yes so in the light and the Mist the the theme or the story is that your friend Sam has disappeared and all we have left is her backpack and this strange deck of cards which happen to be a Tarot deck and so this is what we're going to these are the two key pieces that we have to try and puzzle together or piece together what happened to Sam and hopefully find her and as we go through this review we're not going to have any spoilers so we'll talk a little bit about how it works we won't give anything away that you wouldn't get in the first like 30 seconds of working out how this game works so um mechanically it's quite interesting because it follows the Tarot deck structure so in a Tarot deck there are 24 22 22. I'm very much into Tara at the moment so I know a lot about it if you follow the channel you might know that Maggie goes from Hobby to hobby and it just so happens that at the moment tarot Dexter her Hobby and I happen to back this on Kickstarter a long time ago perfect timing and it was perfect timing for us to get this off the shelf but the way it works is that you have the 22 major Arcana cards and they are basically going to give you a little bit of a spear know to do with the puzzle so they trigger some content and then they are going to have their own puzzle that involves the minor Arcana or other cards in the deck and there's always a different number of cards and the puzzles are all very different and they're Loosely based around the theme of each of those major Arcana you can kind of connect them to all of those well if you you know if you've sort of seen tarot decks I've seen you know people doing readings and divinations and things like that you you know some of the cards you know the death card and you know like the the fool and the magician and all of this sort of stuff and so all of that obviously is represented and there's there's links to elements of the story as you go along yeah and what's really interesting is you can complete these puzzles in a non-linear way and so just like in a Tarot deck where you might be selecting a card from like so the cards get shuffled and your fate is revealed by a card that's a similar way to this how the system works in that you don't have to follow it in the order of the main major Arcana you can choose a card and pick your fate and that dictates the puzzle that you're going to get next and the solution leads to a piece of the story and ultimately you're trying to piece the entire story together so unlike usual reviews where we can show you a ton of stuff we can't in this review but we'll talk about some of the things that we really liked about this experience and the first thing is of course undeniably Jack fellows and the illustration style that is used the artwork the aesthetic is just beautiful absolutely incredible and the way that the puzzles are integrated with their artwork and you're using cards multiple times across the puzzles as well but it's always really clear to you in subtle ways which parts of the card you're meant to be looking at I really liked that about it's really well integrated so when you look at the card it just looks like it's just this beautiful illustration and it's not until you're kind of bringing together the cards that are needed for a particular puzzle that you're like oh okay so this is what all these cards to have in common I really enjoy that and it's just beautiful in it and it's got that sort of like sort of mysterious you really get that sense of the Mist mysterious but also a little bit kind of uh there's there's a warmth to the mystery as well I think because a lot of it's sort of in the memory type uh realm yeah it talk a little bit about the writing because Rita and Jax work together on the writing as it's our understanding um what Rita did the puzzles of course as uh she's known for with post curious um and Jack did all of the artwork but together they came up with the story and the writing is quite good um you know a lot better than other board games that we've experienced with narrative yeah um and I feel like it was just enough as well yeah I wouldn't want too much more because of course you have to read out and if you're working together as a group on the puzzles there's a little bit to get through in terms of the lead up to the next puzzle yeah I would agree it does feel like it's quite balanced the amount of narrative that you're sort of reading through and then the amount of time that you spend doing a puzzle it's not like oh it's been all this time reading about like doing a puzzle and then we just read two lines and then go back to the to a puzzle or the other way around where it's like the puzzle takes two seconds and then you're like 20 minutes reading story after you know page so it's a really nice balance it is a good balance and the story I sort of felt it was you know it was engaging enough like you're sort of like you're trying to you genuinely feel like you're trying to piece together you know what happened you know so yeah it's motivating it did have me wondering after I finished the last puzzle huh that was an interesting tidbit of information I wonder what's going to happen next we've been doing recapping it's like okay so what do we know what do we know that thing and then that seems to be happening or yeah yeah and there are a couple of like sensitive themes throughout and so um they did include a trigger warning so please check that there are some adult themes in there so um just be aware of that before you break it open with family you might want to read those trigger warnings um but then I also wanted to talk about the fact that they as they talked about on the kickstarter that this deck is also meant to be used as a tarot card deck independently of the game and yeah yeah so it is a full uh Tarot deck so you can actually um you can usually you can usually you can actually use it as a tower deck I because it's really the purpose of this is mainly to serve the puzzles I would say that it's not optimized for readings or even to play you know some people do play uh trick taking games which is what's the origin of tarot decks was they were just like a parlor game for trick taking games so you it would be hard to play it with this mainly because the way the look of the major Arcana cards and your minor Arcana cards is very similar so it can be quite hard to kind of tell them apart um so that's sort of again I would sort of I love the artwork in it and a lot of times a lot of people collect tarot decks just for the artwork and just to kind of go through it including this one just kind of goes through it and kind of just yeah just almost kind of get lost in those pieces of Art and see what they evoke and you can definitely do that um with this and what I did enjoy is that if you're familiar with the the kind of classic tarot the um the right away Smith sort of deck which are all the kind of images that we all sort of are more familiar with we've seen even though this is not following that exact same imagery there's elements that are kind of calling back to each one of those ones so if you know that deck well you're gonna be like ah yeah I see this element they've kind of brought it in here but it's still mixed in with everything else I'm not I'm not just visually but also as part of the puzzle so there's like there's yeah you know they're kind of thematically intertwine what the card is meant to be and also when you resolve it you're like oh of course of course that makes perfect sense because that's the card but yeah that's really great that they've done that as well and really focused on I guess the background and history yeah they even have the little white book which is like every tower that comes with its own little book of um essentially what's the the the meaning of each one of the cards so if you did want to use it for you know for divinations or for for that sort of stuff you could but it's it wouldn't be the primary it's not the primary purpose of this particular deck so let's talk about the puzzles so the puzzles and we have not ever done a um puzzle game by post curious no put that out there go first now incredibly interested to do more um because I just found the puzzles were the perfect balance of challenging enough for Maggie and I and I'll caveat that with the fact that we play Heavy games we've done a lot of Escape rooms we do we've done a lot of escape room boxes and and things like that and so we're not new to the world of puzzles we're not experts by any means but we definitely probably uh you know you you get used to like the familiar Trope sort of puzzles that you can work them out and we found that this was sometimes the puzzle was immediately obvious and to one of us and not the other person um sometimes um you know it required a piece of paper and us to like do some kind of calculations or think through the puzzle by drawing it out sometimes it was a spatial puzzle and so there are lots of different things on yeah but what was interesting is there was a good amount of like sometimes I find in other puzzle games you just don't know how they got to the solution it's it's kind of like oh okay well that was really abstract who was ever going to piece that together yeah and with this one I think you know the other great thing is you can bring people in and out of these puzzles because it's not linear you're kind of just working on a puzzle and for some of the puzzle cards we brought my sister in yeah and she's particularly good at puzzles like this but you know we would spend I think on one occasion it was like over half an hour on a single puzzle yeah and it was just like trial and error and working things out and when you crack it you feel so smart and you feel it's so satisfying when and it's really clear when you've cracked it so I won't talk too much about how that works mechanically but it's definitely you know when you've solved it it's not ambiguous about how we solved it have we not and so I just thought that was that was really incredible and like very much masterful kind of puzzle I love just like the variety of the puzzles as well and the fact that even just now I'm actually realizing how many of them if not potentially all of them the way you go about doing the puzzle is actually very thematically linked to the major Arcana card that is triggering that puzzle like this so so there's just there's so many layers of thought that has gone into it and yeah I and it actually it played really well with the three of us like when we had when we had your sister playing with us um most of the time it was just the two of us I think if you were to start adding more people it would get tricky because obviously you're all trying to sort of see the same small car well you know tarot sized cards but at two and three it was fine yeah SOLO would be fine as well and the puzzles are just activating different parts of our brains because sometimes it was really obvious to Maggie and not my sister and I sometimes it's really obvious to me you know and so it felt like all of us were contributing something to each of these puzzles so I I realized how how I was not the most valuable player a lot of I was like I am so bad at so many of these puzzles and Amy and I'm up yeah and I'm very comfortable with going let's just get a hint and Amy's like no I want to try and crack this by myself so that's probably why with some of those puzzles we spent you know even longer no no we're gonna have to figure it out you better like it and you could if you wanted to you could put away the puzzle and go to a different puzzle if you wanted and like be ruminating on how to create that puzzle in the middle of the night you wake up I've got it I know what I need to do with the cards yeah because another thing and something you really liked about this game is there's no time pressure yes I really enjoy that because yes like that that whole yes it adds tension when you're when you're kind of playing an escape room in a box but in here the puzzle itself is like a lot of them are challenging enough but it's being able to just spend the time to think it through is actually really satisfying super satisfying it became that game that was just you know sitting on you know in our line of science and every now and then we'd have a Lazy Afternoon where we're like ah you know let's have a cup of tea and sit down and work out a few more puzzles and over the course of what was oh definitely over five hours of um puzzling so it took us a little while because we were doing it in like batches of puzzles um and we do like three or four and then we'd be like that's enough now like for today my brain is in overdrive and then we come back to it and it was just perfect for that I absolutely adored it I actually and it's so portable as well like it's just such it doesn't take up a whole heap of room and so it's very easy at the end of the day to just go oh you know do you want to maybe do a couple of puzzles yeah we did take it with us to other people's houses um yeah a couple of times it's really just the yeah the rule book essentially that's the one that has all the story and all the sort of bits and pieces and your deck yeah that's it and the last thing I want to comment on uh is the hint system itself so you can um you can work out if you have cracked the puzzle or using the book that it comes with so you don't need to have any Electronics but they do have a QR code that you can scan to use to not only work out if you've cracked the puzzle but also as the hint system and the hint system is really excellent because it gives you just like if you're an escape room and they start with like a a very loose yet yeah and then it gets more and more specific it's really great if you just want to steer in the right direction and then I'm like no no that's enough we could work it out from here no do not turn token two so and it's very clear when it's about to give you the answer it kind of goes spoiler ahead you know this is about it so you know to go oh okay I won't push it anymore I'm just going to try and figure it out from here yeah yeah so light in the Mist just incredible experience that we wanted to share with you all Megan I just had so much fun with this I was really surprised by it like I I was intrigued by it because I knew that I would like the artwork and I was kind of into tarot at the moment but I was actually really sort of taken by how much I was enjoying just sort of sitting down even though the puzzles were really like not all of them some of the puzzles are quite quick and sort of you can figure them out but some of the ones were you know really tough I was still really enjoying myself and everyone we're cooperating together we can do it when it comes to puzzles so there you go yeah um I would give this a 8 out of 10. I just really thought it was a spectacular example of this genre I think it's a great step up if you've been playing um you know those little escape room style games because the puzzles are harder it's probably a bit more it feels a bit more adult a bit more sophisticated yeah um and then it's just gorgeous as well yeah I'm actually going to agree I'm gonna give it an eight as well because it has just that Perfect Blend of narrative but it's not just sort of hitting you over the head with just like reading them forever and ever and then the puzzles and in just in every card and every time you're working through those cards it's just such a an aesthetic and visual Delight that has just yeah beautiful experience we hope you enjoyed this review if you did please like the video subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and we'll be back with more board game content soon but otherwise bye for now bye [Music]

Channel: ThinkerThemer

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Keywords: board games, board game reviews, board game mechanics, tabletop games, tabletop game reviews, board game themes, thinker themer, thinkerthemer, top 10, boardgames, boardgame, top 10 boardgames, review, reviews, the light in the mist board game, the light in the mist, the light in the mist game, the light in the mist review, the light in the mist puzzle

Id: 52BkX8zEZZc

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023