The Morrison Game Factory

Review

Game Description

“When an urban explorer sends you a package recovered from an abandoned board game factory, you instantly know that there is more to these materials than meets the eye. The box in your hands doesn’t just contain a board game—it contains an untold story.”

Personal Experience

I’ve talked several times before about how great PostCurious games are. Part of their appeal is the growing diversity of their experiences—compare the cerebral and philosophical Threads of Fate with the whimsical, pun-laden Ministry of Lost Things for example—each of which have explored different mediums and have had their design tailored to them. It also feels like they’ve really worked on filling out their catalog to appeal to a wider range of puzzlers, with shorter experiences like Ministry of Lost Things being very beginner friendly and then escalating in scale and complexity to their bigger experiences like Threads of Fate and The Emerald Flame. The Morrison Game Factory continues both of these trends, with a delightfully retro aesthetic and novel design, while also slotting in just to the right of Ministry of Lost Things on the difficulty and length scale.

Deftly combining narrative and puzzle into one stellar experience, the game was a joy to play through; taking me a little over two hours to experience from start to finish.

Narrative

A 1950s Atomic Space Age aesthetic permeates all of the physical components, which feel as authentically vintage as the components did in Ruud Kool’s very excellent Vandermist Dossier¹So, it was not much of a surprise then when Ruud Kool was listed in the credits as one of the graphic designers!, lending the game an aura of plausibility and aiding suspension of disbelief from the very start. Not only do the components look good, but every piece and puzzle mimetically ties in to the story. It’s one of those accomplishments that looks easy when done well, but is actually incredibly difficult to pull off, I was quite impressed!

The story, written by frequent PostCurious collaborator Lauren Bello (Threads of Fate, the upcoming Emerald Flame sequel Emerald Echoes), was unexpectedly touching and emotional. It also had something that a lot of puzzle experiences don’t manage: a narrative arc. There’s a wonderful story here and I really enjoyed it from start to finish. Much of what happens in the game was a surprise, so I don’t want to spoil anything here, but there is a lot more going on with this experience than the description would imply.

Puzzle Play

I had a really great time with the puzzles in this game. As mentioned above, this experience is on the less difficult side of things compared to the other, larger, multi-part experiences like The Emerald Flame, but was still a little more difficult than Ministry of Lost Things, a nice medium difficulty. The puzzles do require an online connection to solve, with the online portions providing the narrative and context for the various board game components and puzzles that come with the experience.

The puzzles themself were well-written and diverse, with a mix of ciphering puzzles (any cipher needed is helpfully included in the components), logic problems, and some that feel a little bit like magic. It was a pretty smooth process throughout and I always knew what puzzle I needed to do next and what components I needed to work with to solve it.

One of the benefits of the online components is that hints were readily available for whichever puzzle you may get stuck on and without potentially spoiling what the other puzzles included in the game might be.

On the accessibility front, this game does a pretty good job. There were some colored components, but I had no issues distinguishing them. There were also some audio components, but transcripts were always provided.

Recommendation

PostCurious has delivered another excellent puzzletale experience with The Morrison Game Factory, one that I’d recommend to puzzlers of all experience levels. If you’ve never played a PostCurious experience before I think that this (or Ministry of Lost Things) would be a great place to get a taste of what they have to offer.