Mother of Frankenstein

Review

Game Description

You have just received “The Shelley Volumes,” a collection of hollowed-out books left by Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) to her son, Florence. In the first volume, you find a message from Mary: “Contained within these volumes is a secret many great men have devoted their entire lives to unearthing, and always in vain. It is a secret I would have taken with me to the grave, except that it is, in more ways than one, our family’s legacy, and thus rightfully belongs with you…”

Personal Experience

Mother of Frankenstein has been on my to-play list for a long while. When Volume One showed up in my friendly local gaming store last year I decided to go ahead and pick it up and give it a try. After playing through and enjoying the first volume, I picked up the other two and played through them as well. I had a big break between each volume while I recovered from a pair of surgeries, but thankfully each chapter was standalone and didn’t require knowledge of the previous volumes.

Unfortunately, Volumes Two and Three were more of a miss for me. Both were dominated by a jigsaw puzzle—a traditional 2D one for Volume 2 and a 3D one for Volume 3—and it turns out that I’m not much of a jigsaw puzzle aficionado. There were also some issues with the other puzzles in those volumes that I’ll explore more in the Puzzle Play section below. Overall, it took nineteen hours to play through the complete experience: four hours for Volume One, six hours for Volume Two, and nine for Volume Three.

Narrative

Basing a puzzle game off the life of someone as famous as Mary Shelley isn’t without risks, but Hatch Escapes knocks it out of the park. The story is consistently great across all three volumes. Each Volume is set in a different part of Mary’s life. Volume One covers her initial courtship with Percy Shelley, Volume Two her melancholy after losing her first child, and Volume Three her later life. Surprisingly the game glosses over her writing of Frankenstein in Switzerland in 1816. This ends up being a smart choice, allowing the player to fill in the blanks on parts of her life that they are likely less familiar with.

The game describes itself as a puzzle novella and there is a decent amount of text to read in the game. (Though I’ve definitely played puzzle games with more!) I really like this aspect of it and the immersion it created, though I could see that being a turn-off to some people. The writers do a good job capturing the voice of Mary across the various stages of her life, its easily the most compelling part of the experience. The narrative is also used to inform and design the (non-jigsaw) puzzles, usually to their benefit, though occasionally to their detriment.

Puzzle Play

Volume One got off to a good start with some well-designed puzzles that ranged from medium-difficulty to high-difficulty. Tough, but fair, they were well-integrated into the narrative. Each puzzle helps you build a large foam ring that which combine together for the final puzzle. I found this progression to be really satisfying and fun.

In Volume Two the puzzles start with a challenging but fun logic problem, but ends up with a series of puzzles in a research journal that start out fun and then end up as brutal slog. The hint site chides you that if you’re organized it will take less than ten minutes, but frankly it wasn’t fun. Reading the design diary¹Warning, spoilers there!, apparently this was the intent, to capture the mood of Mary Shelley at this point in her life. I understand the impulse, but disagree with that design decision. The majority of the volume is taken up by assembling the jigsaw puzzle. The experience does a few novel things with it, but I would have liked to see it integrated more into the experience.

In Volume Three, the vast majority of the time is spent assembling a 3D version of Castle Frankenstein. In effect this is two jigsaw puzzles, one a 2D version where you are assembling the various walls that make up the structure, and the second the 3D version where you are assembling all the walls into the structure itself. I’ve never done a 3D puzzle before, so that was pretty neat! I ran into some frustrations with the assembly process. A mild frustration, the foam pieces are slick and the outside walls had a hard time sticking together. A much larger frustration, the roof pieces are constructed using paper craft folding techniques. This required a lot of manual dexterity and small precise folds, it wasn’t too bad on the simpler roofs, but I ended up getting frustrated and giving up on the final roof.

There were a few other parts of the final puzzle sequence in the third volume that I felt like could have used some play-testing and feedback. You’re instructed to insert cardboard into the completed castle, which is tough to do given the fragility of the structure and ultimately prevents a later puzzle from being solved. One puzzle required looking for a symbol that doesn’t seem to exist in the final product. Overall, it felt like a sloppy end to a long experience.

Given the difficulty of the puzzles throughout, there is mercifully a decent hint system in place. They actually offer two systems, an online system with hints and solutions for each puzzle, and a separately sold hint book for offline hints. I haven’t seen a company offer both online and offline hints like that before, but its nice that it’s an option!

The first two volumes were both colorblind friendly with no puzzles that required being able to distinguish colors. Unfortunately there were a couple of puzzles in Volume Three that required it, including one that involved sorting colors on a spectrum. I ended up having to get the solutions from the hint site for those puzzles.

Recommendation

The game suggests that it supports up to six players, but most of the puzzles would be hard for more than one or two people to solve at a time. It definitely plays best as a solo game.

While I enjoyed parts of Mother of Frankenstein, overall it’s hard for me to recommend this game. That said, if you’re a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast, I think this might be a good experience for you.