Amelia’s secret

The manor in Scrapson Forest has a history of sordid stories and terrifying tales associated with it. Since the Vonleaken family moved in, things have become gradually worse, until their daughter disappeared. Are you brave enough to take on the terrors of Scrapson Manor and discover Amelia’s Secret?

Amelia’s Secret is a Augmented Reality (AR) escape room that turns your house into the puzzle itself. To play you’re going to need to download a free Android or iOS app, and while you could play this on a phone, I think you’ll be better served if you’ve got something like a tablet to use – particularly if you’re playing with a large group. The recommended player count is 1-4, though I suspect you could go a little higher if you can get everyone within sight of the device you’re using. It’s also rated 12+ though it feels harder to comment on that. There are definitely a couple of moments where the AR is a little more jump-scare, but it’s not graphic. Ultimately, if you’re playing with anyone in that 12-13 bracket, you’ll know best whether this will feel like the right game for you.

The review will be spoiler free and while the photos show some content, there are no spoilers

Setup

There’s not much in the box, so setup is pretty straightforward. After you’ve downloaded the app, put the game board on a table or surface somewhere. You’ll be moving about a fair bit and you don’t regularly come back to it, so anywhere flat is fine.

The rest of the components are square cards with an assortment of pictures on them – typically things you’d find in a room of your house. Each card tells you where you need to place it (on a table or flat surface, approx. 5ft off the ground etc), and giving yourself enough space for this is crucial. Throughout the game you’ll use your device to scan the cards which will then come to life as 3D elements you can interact with through the app.

The game includes a little stub of Blu-tac so you can affix cards wherever you need to. You can also choose to spread them around your house if you want the feeling of a haunted mansion, though we confined ourselves to a single room – inadvertently introducing some claustrophobia to the proceedings.

Some cards have different height requirements – typically being either 2ft or 5ft off the ground. We found that you could fix them at their relative heights to the back of the same door and they didn’t interfere with each other, so even if you’re short on space, you should be OK. The app also allows you to turn your device’s torch on to scan cards, so if you’re beave enough to play in the dark, you can!

Getting Going

The app comes with three modes – tutorial, short game, or long game. I’d definitely recommend the tutorial as it helps you understand how the AR and the app work, and gets you familiar with interacting with the elements you’ll discover. It actually took a few tries for us to figure this bit out properly – moving too far away from, or too close to the objects means you’ll have to rescan, so it’s better to cut your teeth on the tutorial than burning through precious seconds on the game timer.

Once you’re ready to go, choose a game length and jump in. This review will focus on the long story – as the shorter version leads you through all the cards over 20 minutes, but doesn’t give you as much story to immerse yourself in.

Hunting For Clues

Time is really of the essence here. The long game gives you a 60 minutes timer and if you’ve not discovered Amelia’s Secret by then, well…. well you’re locked in the scary manor house, and nobody wants that.

If you’ve played any kind of escape game, either a real-life physical experience, an Exit or Unlock game, or anything else in between, you’ll be wholly familiar with the structure here. You’ve got a number of clues to look at, figure out how different parts of the story connect and ultimately uncover elements that will help you escape before the time runs out.

There’s a small element of beginner’s luck – scanning a couple of connected things early on a) gives you some good momentum and b) helps you understand the interactivity pretty well. There’s not too much inference needed either – the pictures on the cards are going to help you tell the story and work out what links together pretty intuitively, so don’t overthink it.

Is It Really That Scary?

No… not terribly. The theme feels pretty dark – you’re looking for a missing child in an environment where horror films tell us it’s typically not a game of hide and seek gone awry. The AR content leans into that theme well – think bloody fingerprints, strange words carved into things, a healthy sprinkling of Latin – all the hits. As I’ve mentioned above, there are a couple of jumps littered around the place as well so it’ll keep you on your toes. Even more so if your cat ominously scratches at the door at the exact moment of a big reveal…

The puzzles feel good too – they’re well linked into the story that you’re gradually uncovering and it feels like a coherent experience all the way through. The levels of interactivity increase a little as you get further in, and the connection across different elements of the story becomes clearer too.

There was one puzzle in particular that we spent a lot of time on where we were perhaps overthinking it, though given the journey we’d been on to that point, the answer felt a little disjointed.

An App Though? How Is It?

Better than you think. I’ve played some games where apps haven’t quite done the job for me, but as a means to turn your house into a scary mansion, I think this works well. It’s easy to scan the cards, and you can pull away and get closer to the objects you uncover, as well as rotate around them – it gives a real sense of discovery and interaction as you go and I think it works well.

There were times where we pushed the limits a little too far and had to rescan a card a few times, but there’s never anything lost from doing that – you progress in a particular clue is never reset so it’s fine.

Final Thoughts

I do love a good horror film or anything with a bit of a psychological thriller element to it, so this had been on my “to play” list for quite some time, and I’m really glad I did. We played as a family of three, and whilst my wife was particularly reluctant about the theme, I can say she had a great time with it too. We also cracked it with exactly six minutes to spare so that probably helped!

We played in a lower light to give ourselves some added atmosphere and that worked well too. The app works well – you can hand it around so everyone gets a go at scanning and working through the interactive elements, and having the clue littered around your room or your house has you up and moving constantly.

If you’ve seen the odd modern horror, the story isn’t going to blow you away, but it felt consistent with what I expected going into it, and I don’t think it needs to get higher above the bar than that.

The obvious drawback is that you’re probably not going to play this more than once, unless you do the short and then the long story. But I also think that’s true of any escape-style game you’d pick up so it’s unfair to mark it down for that.

If you like the horror genre, and love an escape-style puzzle, I really think you’d want to give Amelia’s Secret a go.

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