The Detective Society: Family Adventures

 

It's taken us a while to finish this; myself and my eight-year old son did two of this three-pack in the last school holiday, then we sort of ran out of time and parked it -- to be brutally honest I was actually leaving doing the third one until he asked about it, to make sure he actually wanted to do it rather than be railroaded by Dad into it.

This morning -- start of the next school holidays -- he looks up from his breakfast and says "Dad, can I do the puzzle game thing?" -- he wanted to do it himself. No Dad involved. He's just finished it and had an absolute blast, I only needed to give advice in a couple of small places.

It's quite a straightforward game, the signposting is excellent, it's always clear what the next step is and which piece of content needs to be used to solve the puzzle. There's a useful chatbot involved which gives hints subtlely based on your inputs -- so if you're close but not there it knows where to focus you, but doesn't give the answer.

The ending -- as is typical with Detective Society offerings -- goes beyond the box contents into some online work, but this is also interesting and involving and he loved the combination of physical puzzle pieces plus online activity.

I got a huge amount of enjoyment watching him play this and puzzle things out, although I had to rein in my control-freak-ism -- I seriously wanted to take over and blast through it myself.

It's a Double Thumbs Up from Charlie and thoroughly recommended as a light family solve.