Game Review: Exit: The Game: Kidnapped in Fortune City by Kosmos

Exit: The Game: Kidnapped in Fortune City designed by Inka and Marcus Brand and published by Kosmos

The sheriff of Fortune City (a town in the American Old West) has been kidnapped by one of the locals and is imprisoned in their cellar. You have come to town to right this injustice, not by being a gun-slinging vigilante. Instead,  you solve a lot of mysteries and riddles to discover which of the local hooligans does not have an alibi. The game proceeds through the usual imaginative puzzles.

The game uses a town map and several locations, including the jail, the gunsmith, and the saloon, to provide the initial puzzles to solve. The very first puzzle is to unlock the sheriff's journal, which provides some key information for the other puzzles as well. In typical Exit style, just about every component inside the shrink wrap is used in one way or another.

Location, map, and locked journal

I liked the use of locations, which allowed some non-linear problem solving. The game lets you choose which building to go to first. After all those puzzles are solved, then the players work on a couple of final puzzles that lead to the sheriff's location and the ultimate victory. Each location is its own fold-out page with valuable information on the front and back. The dispersal of clues throughout the other puzzles makes it possible to work on parts of the final solution before getting there, though obviously there's not enough to make the guess before the last puzzle.

As usual, we had one or two puzzles that we needed hints for, though one of them was because we weren't using a card we were supposed to have. We enjoyed it overall quite a lot (especially the name of the sheriff...R. Grimes--maybe we should have left him in that cellar to avoid the zombie apocalypse). A few other little jokes are thrown in. The game was a lot of fun and didn't seem as difficult as the rating states. 

Recommended.