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We enjoy escape room style games in our house, like the Exit series and Unlock series, so I was excited to get Brooklyn 2002 and see how a crime scene in a box might work and bring a twist to the clue solving style game. Let’s see how it played…
Uncovering the scene
Set up was very simple, organising the cards into number order face down in their separate piles and laying out the crime scene photo board. Then it was time to open the story book, read the first section and get started.
As you progress through the game you add cards together forming an investigation style board which was a nice feature.
Storyline and clues
The story book is very detailed and I had high hopes after reading the introduction for a highly detailed storyline with complicated clues where I would need to make notes as we went along. This wasn’t really how it played though. The storyline whilst sounding detailed didn’t really have anything to do with solving the clues. The clues all involved finding a particular item/s in the crime scene photo, looking at the number square that the item is in and taking that number card as the next one. It didn’t really feel like puzzle solving, it was more a search and find game.
The story book was used to find the word of which item you’re looking for in the format of being given the number of the page, line number and word number on that line which then gives you for example ‘shoe’ you need to then find the shoe in the crime scene photo as described above.
This became rather repetitive and lacked imagination. The Exit style games always impress me with unique aspects to each game where clues are hidden in unusual places or you have to do something interesting to uncover the next step and think outside of the box a little. I highly recommend checking out the Exit series. Brooklyn 2002 was very different in that once we realised the order of things we just did them on a loop to get to the end.
Crime and replay ability
Subject matter wise it’s definitely not a family game but if you wanted something straight forward with a good storyline behind it this could be a good play.
You can’t play it again once finished as it’s just one storyline but this is quite standard with this type of game. Brooklyn 2002 is completely resettable once complete so that it can be passed on to someone else to play as no elements are destroyed/altered etc when playing.
There’s no time limit on the game but if you make a mistake you have to take out one of the Reputation cards from the final pack. When you reach the end of the game the cards you have left from this stack spell out a clue so that you can pick what the detective should do at the end of the story out of three options. Once you pick you get the ending to the story. This was a nice ending but I would have enjoyed something a bit more like this going through where you make some choices and affect the investigation in a different way.
Final thoughts
I played this with my husband one evening and we both agreed it wasn’t really for us. We wanted to be challenged a bit more and have a bit more variation in the game. I wouldn’t be looking to get more games from the same series but as a one off we did enjoy working together to complete the Brooklyn 2002 investigation.
