Scarlet Envelope: Dinner With Anonymous

Review

Game Description

“First course – peanut stew, main course – your dirty lies with a tahini dressing.” Five honorable guests have been blackmailed into dining with Anonymous. Everyone’s a suspect when murder is on the menu. In a twisted turn of events, you find yourself in Anonymous’ basement, kidnapped and challenged to answer two questions: “Who is Anonymous? And what have these five people done to piss them off?”

Personal Experience

With Scarlet Envelope getting their final regular installment ready to ship out, I figured it’s about time for me to catch up on the series. (It has somehow been an entire year somehow since I played series highlight Tale of a Golden Dragon!) The most exciting part of Scarlet Envelope’s game series is how it reinvents itself with each game, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Dinner With Anonymous, but was excited to find out. The series has always had an undercurrent of conspiracy and menace, but this is the first game to take a deep dive into the horror genre. (Despite the similar name, Breakfast for a Serial Killer was far more mid-century noir than horror.)

Once I opened the envelope and dumped its pieces out, I had a little trouble getting started this time around, unsure of where to start. I can’t blame the game though, I had set down my trusty puzzle game notebook on top of one of the game components—specifically the one that guides you on where to start. 🙃 Thankfully, I was able to find the hints website (accessible, as usual, after solving an easy puzzle) and that helped me remember that I was missing a piece. Once I had that piece back and started the game in earnest, I had a great time through this experience. Overall it took about 90 minutes to play through once I really got started.

Narrative

Dinner with Anonymous was made in collaboration with fellow Canadian puzzle creator Keith Dozois, who released the horror-themed USB Escape (which I haven’t played yet, but did order after playing this). It’s a far more multimedia experience than previous experiences, with a number of well-produced videos peppered throughout the experience, along with several websites. Overall these elements work well together, along with the puzzles, to tell a cohesive and interesting story.

While the genre is horror and there is a small amount of fake blood involved, I don’t think the squeamish would have much of an issue playing through this experience. It’s more creepy than scary. This is even reflected with its included playlist which starts with Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash” and includes the Beetlejuice theme. If you’ve played Jackbox Games’ Trivia Murder Party, this is about on that level. Playful horror.

Puzzle Play

The puzzles in this experience varied in difficulty, but even the more difficult ones were fun and satisfying to solve. They tied in well with the narrative and had the advantage of all solving towards similar formats, making it clear what sort of solution you were solving towards. While I’ve enjoyed Scarlet Envelope’s experiences from the beginning, one of the nice things about playing them in order is seeing the quality of everything go up as the creators get more experienced. It makes me excited to continue playing through the series.

One puzzle involved distinguishing between colors, specifically red, green, blue, yellow. The green looked slightly darker in hue to me than the red did, so I was able to tell them apart. However that may pose an issue to other people with colorblindness.

As usual, there was an excellent hints site available, on the experienced level of play that’s hidden behind an easy to solve puzzle.

Recommendation

The Scarlet Envelope series continues to impress! I still recommend that most people start with their first experience Newspaper: Intro to Mysteries to get a taste of what they’re all about and then play through the whole experience if they enjoy it. In that linked review I also discuss whether you should go for the Starter/Regular or Experienced track.

If you’re a person who is looking to for a single game to play, at this point I’d recommend either this experience or Tale of a Golden Dragon, depending on the genre you’d prefer. They are both excellent experiences.

Congratulations

Lastly, because stories of queer joy and love are so important in these times, congratulations to Scarlet Envelope creators Anna and Lisa on their recent wedding! I wish them all the best! 🌈