Exit: The Game – The Missing Hollywood Star

Review

Game Description

“Your part-time job as a pizza delivery driver was pretty boring — until today! You are about to deliver pizza to one of the most famous film studios in the world. Shooting of the new Christmas blockbuster should be in full swing, but when you arrive, the set is dark and deserted. Something is very wrong here. Where’s the film crew? Oh, and where is the Hollywood star you were desperate to get an autograph from? All you find are spooky footprints in the fake snow that lead straight to a gaping hole in the studio wall.

Do you have the courage to follow the trail and go deep behind the scenes of the film studio? This advent calendar is an EXIT game and an adventure story in one: To find the missing star, you must open a little calendar door every day. Behind each, you will find an exciting new riddle, the solution to which will help you to move onto the next day. Only if you follow the clues and solve all 24 riddles, will you uncover the secret and save the Christmas blockbuster.”

Personal Experience

While I’m not a religious person, a puzzle game advent calendar has always seemed like a fun idea. So, when I was wandering around my FLGS¹Friendly Local Gaming Store back in November and saw Exit: The Game‘s 2024 advent calendar The Missing Hollywood Star on the shelf, it was an impulse purchase for me.

I dutifully waited until December 1st to star the experience and played it every day until its conclusion on Christmas Eve. Most days, especially early on, it would take just a minute or two solve the days puzzle, but they got harder as the month went on taking as much as ten minutes for some of the trickier ones.

Overall, I thought it was fun having a little puzzle break everyday. So much so, that I’m thinking of picking up more of the advent calendars to play at other points throughout the year. (It might be fun to do one during my birthday month, for example.)

Narrative

As the game’s description describes, there is a running narrative throughout the entire month, describing how you explore a seemingly abandoned film studio (the playfully named Werner Sisters lot), looking for a missing starlet. The game materials bolster this narrative, with the entire inside of the box looking like a video control board and each day’s door opening up into holes decorated like a film sets and studio rooms.

The narrative’s story is more or less an excuse to make a bunch of film references with some obvious choices (Star Wars, Jurassic Park) and some less obvious ones (Dirty Dancing). Thankfully knowledge of those films isn’t a necessity, but being familiar with them will make the experience more enjoyable. Interestingly, while Warner Bros was changed to Werner Sisters, none of the films inside of the experience have been similarly modified. While this makes the references easier to understand, I think that it was a missed opportunity for some silly names.

The narrative takes some fun twists and turns, and features some events that would strain credulity if it weren’t so obviously just a light-hearted homage to the magic of cinema.

Puzzle Play

The puzzles in this month-long experience were very similar to the past Exit: The Game experiences I’ve played through for good and for ill. The good is that the puzzles are often inventive, clever and use every part of the box, rulebooks, etc. Each puzzle feels distinct and often are able to capture some sort of essence of the movie being referenced. The components for each puzzle are hidden behind that day’s door with a list of components included to make sure that you have everything you need.

I also really enjoyed that none of the doors were labeled. Each day’s puzzle solved to giving you the location of the next door. Symbols printed on the door cleverly also functioned as the mechanism for telling you whether or not you’ve found the correct answer.

The less-than-good aspects are something I’ve noticed with the other Exit games, chiefly the difficulty of the puzzles can vary wildly from one puzzle to the next. The experience is rated at a Beginner’s Difficulty, and it starts off with some pretty easy puzzles. However, instead of going from easy to hard, there would be several days of easier puzzles and then a super difficult, relatively esoteric puzzle would pop up out of nowhere one day, then the next day’s puzzle would go back to being relatively easy. It felt jarring, and like their experiences could benefit from more playtesting.

A few of the puzzles involved searching around the components and counting elements. Given how small and easily missable the components can be, I didn’t much care for those puzzles. I was fortunate to have the magnifying glass I got from Doomensions²where, appropriately, I had the same complaint about counting puzzles on hand, but I would like to propose that we retire that type of puzzle from now on.

Taking extra care to not spoil anything, there were also several, otherwise inventive, puzzles that were made extra difficult by the cramped space of the advent calendar rooms. For those puzzles it was difficult to maneuver needed components into place and to read the results.

There were a few puzzles that were color based, but I had much less difficulty this time around than I have had with previous experiences. Many of the colors were based around a red-blue-yellow color scheme, though that could pose problems to people with tritanopia.

The game comes with a hint book that gives three hintier hints before giving the solution. It came in handy for some of the more esoteric puzzles, though I’d love to see them adopt an online hint sit where they could give a broader gradient of hints.

Recommendation

Despite my gripes, I did enjoy this experience and will likely pick up this year’s Advent Calendar (the recently announced The Intergalactic Race). If I can find them, I’ll also likely pick up some of the older ones as well.

As for my recommendation, I would recommend this to any puzzle fan looking for a daily puzzle fix, whatever the time of year. Though, I would also strongly recommend playing with a partner, if possible, to help with the more esoteric puzzles included.