Rottumereye Tragedy by Knetterijs

This was played February 2021 but this review has been revamped to add more.

Inspectors' Review:

• 10/10 sniffable paper

• very colourful for our eyes

• Paper is nice to sit on

• We wish to go to this island for...birdwatching purposes only...not at all to taste birdies

---

Boss' Review:

Despite COVID preventing me from socializing much in person, I recently (over the past few months) have found a new way to play puzzles people. We both purchase the game and meet up over Zoom, Facetime, Microsoft, etc. While this costs us both more in the end (rather than splitting a game) I have greatly enjoyed being able to enjoy playing with others. Rottumereye Tragedy was a puzzle game that fell into my lap as a result of wanting to play with friends and one friend recommended trying this out. We both ordered our respected games and met on zoom to unpack this game. While most of this paragraph was a I digression, I do want to encourage people that there are ways to play with others even with this pandemic!

Rottumereye a deductive based game where you are attempting to discover who killed a famous birdwatcher on Rottumereye Island. You have been asked to examine case notes, evidence, film footage, view interrogations…but how they are presented is not the conventional method often seen in murder mystery game. In a typical mystery game you are given a police file or a transcript of the interrogations or access to a video on the night of the crime. In this game, everything is presented through beautiful drawings from a comic book style interrogation or a panoramic view of video footage. You also get a sense of character as each piece of evidence is tailored to fit the character it represents such as a comic book in Japanese to adhere to the confusion the one suspect is experiencing as he cannot speak English. I thought this visual representation of the mystery was beautiful and I enjoyed inspecting all the images looking for little clues…and boy were there! In addition, you also learned back stories, character traits, and more when inspecting each clue which I greatly enjoyed.

Now, this game is deduction based, which means there were no puzzles per say. Your task was to look for clues in the images and texts to build a timeline, check alibis, and find clues that might show what happened and why. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, finding these little clues that created a sudden light bulb that had me rifling through the papers to compare it with something else was something quite enjoyable. Even without the puzzles, I was able to unravel the narrative carefully and piece by piece before deciding who I thought may have done it. The game ends when you decide you have an answer and would like to open the final pamphlet that will conclude the game. I will note, the game doesn’t change anything if you got the answer wrong – it will simply just show you an epilogue that sums up the narrative BUT they do it visually which I thought was splendid.

In terms of customer service, I ordered this off Etsy and it arrived in a decent amount of time. I will say the shipping is not cheap - to ship to Canada it's almost the same price as the game but I was willing to pay it since they game wasn't too expensive itself. Now, I will say the shipping box for the game was adorable and had additional stickers and a pin! These additional touches were sweet and memorable for me and show that want to make receiving this game an experience from opening the box to solving the puzzle. Also, the stickers and pin provide a URL to a online mini game where your decision change the outcome of the game – I didn’t dive too deep in it (only did two walkthroughs) but it was beautifully drawn and I liked that element of being able to impact the game’s narrative.

Overall, this a shorter game them most (about an hour for two people to solve) but the Knetterijs’ collective team of eight artists come together to create a beautifully animated experience that worked well. If you enjoy deduction games, appreciate art, and want a shorter game for an evening then I think this is an excellent choice.

Check out their website here.

To buy their game, check out their Etsy link is here.