Trip 1907: Interactive Escape The Book Game Paperback – February 2, 2018

Our family is fanatical about puzzles and puzzle rooms, so the prospect of a book that we could do together, in the comfort of our own home, was very intriguing. We got our laptop out, chrome cast to our big screen TV, and settled in to an evening of togetherness and intrigue.Alas, by the12th Chapter, we'd lost both the teenage boys to their electronics, and by Chapter 15, my husband had also thrown in the towel... Mind you, it took us less than 35 minutes to get to get to Chapter 15, and a meaningful percent of that time was spent cutting out pieces to one of the clues.THE GOOD NEWS- the illustrations in this book are quite engaging, creative, and definitely fit the mystery "vintage" of the tale- the concept of the story is interesting (more about the story below)- several of the puzzles are very clever and fun to solve with creative tricks on the eye and/or unique twist of the brain to arrive at the conclusion- there is an online forum on the website where additional questions are answered and sometimes clarifications are supplied.THE BAD NEWS- We didn't want to cheat - so we never looked at the pages throughout the book - we focused on the chapters we'd uncovered. Because the opening instructions are so poor, we completely missed that there are pages in the back of the book that can be used for the "cutting out" clues (don't want to leave any spoilers, so I'll just say that). To the authors - if you are going to provide additional resources in the back of the book - somewhere in the instructions, that'd be great to know.- We also didn't want to cheat by looking things up on the internet, we assumed that we could use the Trip 1907 website, and the book, and we'd have everything we needed. In at least one instance, the website directs you to a YouTube video (it took us a little while to figure out this was on purpose and "legal" - and several chapters later there were other things that, unless you are literally an encyclopedia of all things, you would need to use resources online to assist you with solving the puzzles. This would also be good to include in the opening instructions, that it's Ok to use resources online, or all of the necessary resources could be included in the story or in the "appendix" (again, no spoilers here).- The clues and clueing system - in some instances, the first clue was just a restatement of the information that was obvious in the story, which was frustrating to use "sanity points" to get a clue, and then have it be useless.- The internet component adds some narrative which is riddled with typos and difficult sentence structure making it hard to read. That's too bad. Unfortunately, this narrative is also fully disconnected from the puzzles, after about 5 chapters of reading and searching for clues in the text, we realized we didn't really need to read any of it as everything we needed was in the book, and on the "solve" page of the website.I agree with other reviewers (not on Amazon), that you want to applaud the effort and creativity, and for the price, I might recommend purchasing the book just to see how many of the puzzles you can solve and enjoy the illustrations - but expect to be frustrated and sometimes left bewildered (even after you've solved a puzzle which robs you of the satisfaction that you got it). Perhaps the biggest frustration is that good testing and honest feedback before publication could have resulted in a little editing and a few tweaks and this would have been amazing. Instead, it's just a mixed bag at best.