SNAP Review – The Cupid Crisis

It’s almost Valentine’s Day. What if your much-awaited special date turned into an escape room puzzle?

Game

Then you’d have The Cupid Crisis, a Valentines-themed mini escape room in the Holiday Hijinks series by Jonathan Chaffer.

This game is published by Grand Gamers Guild, it’s best for 1-2 players, and it took us about an hour to play.

Art

The art here is similar to the other Holiday Hijinks games, with plenty of nods to typical Valentines Day themes such as chocolates, roses, candles, and dancing. There was more text and fewer pictures than in previous games, but the theme stayed strong.

Mechanics

As we’ve mentioned with other Holiday Hijinks games, the puzzle solutions and hints are provided through a website that functions like an app on your phone or other device. There’s a QR code on the inside flap of the box that you can use to get there quickly.

Once you’re at the site for the right holiday, click “Start” and flip over the first card.

You’ll definitely want pen and paper for this one – and you’ll probably need the reference materials handily provided on the site, too. (That’s the only spoiler we’re going to give – you’re probably going to need some of those reference materials.)

Expectations

We’ve enjoyed all of the Holiday Hijinks puzzles so far. We expected this one would contain a mix of trivia, word puzzles, and logic, and things like that.

Since it’s a Valentine’s theme, we decided to play it with just the two of us. We’re glad we did, too, because there were multiple puzzles that used information our kids would not know.

Like we said, there’s at least one puzzle in there that we barely knew the information for, so…

Surprises

Right away, you are presented with several different puzzles to work on. That’s a little bit different than we’ve seen in the past.

Thankfully, you don’t need to solve them in any particular order. Each puzzle solution will let you move forward – but eventually you will need to solve all of them to get to the end of the game (like most escape rooms).

The plot of this escape room had some twists and turns. We won’t spoil them for you, but at least one puzzle led us down a very different path than we expected. We got ourselves very twisted up until we looked up hints.

What also surprised us was how easy and fast it was to assemble the print-and-play (because we tried that before getting our full copy). It was really easy and fast to put together, with really good instructions.

If you want to get the puzzle as soon as possible, the print-and-play is a really good option to do that; you can download it right away.

Recommended?

Like the other Holiday Hijinks games (this is the fourth one in the series, after all), we think the Cupid Crisis is a great way to spend an hour or so with friends and family – or just a loved one.

There’s nothing here inappropriate or off-putting for children, so feel free to include them when you play, if you want to.

It is best for playing right around the holiday (Valentine’s Day), so order it now from Grand Gamers Guild so you can play with your main squeeze!

We rate The Cupid Crisis 4 out of 5 hearts.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of The Cupid Crisis from Grand Gamers Guild for this review.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?