Review on Break In™ Alcatraz By PlayMonster - Unlock The Mystery Of America'S Most Infamous Prison by Michael Barrett

I didn't have high hopes going in to this game, given the other reviews, and they aren't wrong, but I was happy for the price I paid ($15). The quality of the game pieces was better than I expected. There's even a plastic 3D puzzle included. The opening layers is unique. Though you'll want to use something flat like a butter knife to help pop the cardstock layers off the plastic studs when its time.This game would be difficult to do in a medium or large group. I played it with one other person, and that was a good number. While there are a couple cases where 3 puzzles can be done in parallel because they are printed on separate cards, there's still only one card giving you direction on all 3 puzzles that you'll have to share, and most of the game is played serially. The printing is small, so you can't have a lot of people working one puzzle at a time. The game rules suggest you take a picture with your phone so multiple players can work it at the same time, but that's pretty ridiculous. And the fact that all the layers stay connected throughout the game, makes it a clumsy to pass around and look at. You'll also need a bright place to play. I would recommend having a flashlight on hand. There's a couple puzzles that are hard to view otherwise.There are a good number of puzzles, with good variety, and for the most part they are the quality you would expect from this kind of game. But there is some conflicting information in some of them that does lower the quality of the game. And some vagueness where there shouldn't be. Like at the start there is a card that says "read this card" and has a picture of a talking face; that actually means pull a card from the deck that has that talking face picture, but when I first saw it I thought it was just saying to read the card aloud. We also had a mix up in our game and didn't realize we were supposed to start the game with the toolbox card and mailbox card. The rules do say that you start with the radio, tools, and letter, but we thought the letter was the previous story page in the rules and didn't realize we could keep the toolbox card either. It didn't call them cards. They could have easily avoided the confusion by also mentioning the card #, but didn't. They had the card icons, but they put them next to an unrelated tip about the making sure the perforations of the toolbox card and another card were cut out. One of the first lines in the rules say to look online for updated clues and hints, which we didn't do, but that's pretty bad to immediately tell people to look for corrections outside the game. We didn't use much of the hints, but the ones we tried to did leave something to be desired. There's also one card at the start of the game that you have 2 paths to get to (by the first puzzle or by reading another card) which left us wondering if we really understood the rules at the time. Those are little things that could have been easily cleared up. As for the conflicting information, there were 3 puzzles that had some contradictory information that threw us off. I do understand the answers, but that contradictory information should have been cleared up.Like other escape room games, once you solve it, you've solved it. But it is very easy to return the game back to its original state, more than most games of this nature, so you can give it to other friends. And I'll keep it to play again once I forget it. Though the shape and size of the box is annoying.