USD ($)
EUR (€)
Beware of the Ratchet Lady!
Final Girl has become in recent years a staple of the Single Player board game. A fantastically thematic game, you play as the titular Final Girl looking to defeat the big bad evil of your playthrough, in a location straight out of a Wes Craven film.
Using your wits, tactics and items you pick up along the way, you strive to survive the horrors that await you, with Final Girl offering a fantastic multitude of different evils to defeat and creepy locations to make every game feel unique, while offering a truly difficult challenge for solo board gamers to overcome, which brilliantly adds to the threat of your chosen killer.
In the last year I have managed to defeat Geppetto and his gang of wooden horrors in Final Girl: Carnage at the Carnival, and managed to bludgeon my way to victory over the butcher Hans while stumbling through Final Girl: The Happy Trails Horror.
Both offered a unique and satisfying challenge, with Geppetto and his puppets particularly proving a very difficult foe to defeat. (A combination of Charlie, an Axe, and a will to live got me through this one!).
But the beauty of Final Girl has always been the fact you can continue to enhance your game, and the plethora of ‘film features’ you can buy to freshen up your play. For my birthday this year, I was served up a new foe to defeat, that being The Ratchet Lady and a trip to Wolfe Asylum. After a few playthroughs, zero wins to my name, and nightmares abound as the Ratchet Lady’s maniacs swarm my character, I can give my review on Final Girl: Madness in the Dark.
Maniacs Everywhere!
First thing to get out of the way: Final Girl, in of itself, is a very difficult game. If the dice rolls go against you and you do not properly plan your actions and your strategy to win, you will lose, and lose badly. Think the final scene in The Cabin in the Woods bad.
Final Girl: Madness in the Dark, only amps up that difficulty.
The Ratchet Lady isn’t by herself the most dangerous of characters. Her initial health pool is low (so maybe an early rush at her might work… hasn’t for me yet though!), her movement is limited and her attacks aren’t great, but do build up quite dangerously when the bloodlust track increases.
But her special ability to heal and ultimately continually increasing her health bar, unlike any other killer I have come up against, can feel particularly harsh. I have had points in my playthroughs where I have used almost all the health tokens the game gives you just on her health alone, as I stared blankly thinking how in the hell are you supposed to defeat this lady!
This is all before her maniacs come into play. The Ratchet Lady at times can pretty much be stationary depending on her Finale card, so she sends her maniacs in to finish off your chosen character.
I found the maniacs a very fun and interesting minion for a killer. Turning your victims into minions that hunt you, not only excellently works with the theme of this killer, but really builds up the tension and means you are forced into changing strategies on the fly to try and cope with their threat. You need to save victims from the onset of the game in order to stop them from becoming her dreaded maniacs. You are also given a new action card, Calm, to help turn minions back into victims. It added a great new layer to the game, and I found their movements and attack patterns much easier to grasp than say the unnecessarily confusing move mechanics of Geppetto’s puppets, which while a fun idea, did mean constant checks of their special rules to ensure I wasn’t breaking the game.
Madness in the Dark added some very fun ideas to liven up my Final Girl playthroughs, with my favourite new addition being the rather special drugs you can find strewn around Wolfe Asylum…
Pill Popping Required!
My favourite new addition that Madness in the Dark adds, more specifically Wolfe Asylum as a location, is the pills mechanic.
Dotted around the asylum is different types of pill, purple, pink, yellow and wild (which can count as any of the three colours). If you end your turn in a place with a pill in it, you can use time to pick one up, however you can’t see which colour your taking. If you take one colour it gives you a small boon. If you take a pair of them, you get an even better boost, but with some side effects. Drugs being taken willy nilly after all do often come with consequences! Take one of each colour at one time though, and you get yourself Amped! Which can be very beneficial to your playthrough.
On my first playthrough I didn’t really touch this new system, it didn’t seem beneficial to me, and a waste of time, (literally time is a mechanic of Final Girl!) I was scared of the side effects, and what my Mum would think!
But in Madness in the Dark, it turns out drugs aren’t always bad. Without them Ratchet Lady just proved too damn strong for Heather or Veronica our titular final girls, but if you can get lucky with the pill combinations you pick up, you can have a much easier path to victory, and could lead to a potentially game changing turn. The side effects are also fairly manageable if you draw lucky.
While I haven’t been able to get that sweet victory yet, I found the pill mechanic such a fun wrinkle on Final Girl. It added a new layer and strategy to the game, with the added suspense of hoping to pick up the colour pill you need to get yourself amped and hopefully change your fortunes, which neither of my other Final Girl locations really had.
Wolfe Asylum generally is probably my favourite location. It feels bigger than the others, with more to explore, really hammering home its theme in the style of something like Shutter Island or the Outlast games. The ability to stun the killer or their maniacs as well felt thematic, and I loved putting on some eerie music and immersing myself into this haunted nightmare.
The items this location adds are also fun, but like the other Final Girl games I do find the event cards can seem like its forcing too many other ideas onto your playthrough. I randomly had Hannibal Lecter stuck on my board doing very little, other than adding an unnecessary rule I had to remember at every Upkeep phase. That said, Wolfe Asylum still may become my go to location until I add more to my Final Girl collection, trying maybe Hans or Geppetto here to see how they will thrive under the flickering lights of the asylum.
Final Thoughts
For those branching out into the single player board game genre, and especially those who love a bit of horror, Final Girl generally is a game I would massively recommend. Madness in the Dark more specifically is a Film Feature I probably wouldn’t recommend to newer players, something like The Happy Trails Horror probably eases you into the game better, but is a feature I think that works perfectly for those who are looking for an even harder challenge, with The Ratchet Lady adding a frighteningly difficult test for you to overcome.
So put on your straightjacket, swallow down some mysterious pills, and make your way to Wolfe Asylum to take on this crazy nurse!