Exit the Deserted Lighthouse: Cracking Riddles + 4 Puzzles | Review

Puzzling and riddling against the ticking time! In the game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse, it’s time to puzzle and riddle. Always in battle with the relentlessly advancing hands of the clock. The mission: climb to the top of the lighthouse and prevent the ship from crashing on the cliffs! 

It is the dead of night. A lonely lighthouse juts out of the middle of the sea, raging waves breaking metres high on its cliffs. The night is starry, but a violent storm is brewing on the horizon. There! A small ship struggles against the waves and is in danger of being torn apart by the rocks in a few hours. Where is the lighthouse keeper and why doesn’t the old lighthouse work as it should? Quickly put the first puzzle together and we find ourselves in the middle of the Escape Room! Now it’s time to pick locks, decode and puzzle. It’s immediately clear that this mission won’t be easy, because the puzzles are quite crunchy!.

The award-winning series EXIT Das Spiel from Kosmos grows every year with new exciting Escape Games for the home. Each game box contains a new mission to puzzle over at different levels of difficulty: there are now EXIT games for beginners, advanced players and professionals. On Abenteuer Freundschaft you can also find a review of the abendoned cabin EXIT game. In the Game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse, a whole new component is added: puzzling!

In the course of the adventure, you puzzle together four new Escape Rooms, in between you puzzle and the story develops on the basis of the 12 enclosed puzzle documents. The concept is very different from Ravensburger’s exit puzzles, where you always have to puzzle together the puzzle escape room before the mission begins. EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse, on the other hand, is much more story-heavy. The story develops with each completed puzzle document and newly puzzled exit room until the grand finale. The game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse is aimed at advanced players, there is also already a game box for beginners with the EXIT game The Lost Temple:

Angebot

KOSMOS 692094 EXIT - Das Spiel + Puzzle - Der verschollene Tempel, Level: Einsteiger, Escape Room Spiel mit Puzzle, EXIT Game mit Puzzle für 1 bis 4 Spieler ab 10 Jahre

Das perfekte Escape-Room-Spiel für Brettspiel- und Puzzlefans; Kooperatives Erlebnisspiel im Level: Einsteiger

15,29 EUR

With the EXIT game series, Kosmos has successfully managed to implement the escape room game trend of recent years in a game for the home. In a classic Escape Game, you enter real rooms equipped with props, search them and solve puzzles as a team in an hour or less in order to move on and master a mission.  We have already played many Escape Rooms in Berlin and also many different Escape Games for home (you can find them by browsing our board game tips) and can only say: both types of Escape Games are an addictive experience and every Escape Game from every provider or player manufacturer differs enormously from each other in concept, gameplay and adventure! My experiences are included in the pros and cons in the conclusion at the end of the review.

Note: Kosmos-Verlag kindly provided us with a review copy of the game EXIT Der einsame Leuchtturm. However, this review is unpaid and gives our honest opinion.

Exit The Deserted Lighthouse – Overview

• Game type: Puzzle, puzzle game, escape game for the home
• Age: from 12 years
• Players: 1-4 players
• Duration: approx. 90-180 minutes
• Publisher: KOSMOS Verlag
• Game authors: Inka & Markus Brand
• Year of publication: 2020
• Game objective: Puzzle together 4 Escape Rooms, solve all the puzzles with as little help as possible and switch on the lighthouse light again before the ship hits the cliffs.

Angebot

KOSMOS 698881 EXIT® - Das Spiel + Puzzle - Der einsame Leuchtturm, Level: Fortgeschrittene, Escape Room Spiel, EXIT Game mit Puzzle für 1-4 Spieler ab 12 Jahre

Das perfekte Escape-Room-Spiel für Brettspiel- und Puzzlefans; Kooperatives Erlebnisspiel im Level: Fortgeschrittene

16,99 EUR

EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse – Puzzles and Riddles Against Time

The game structure is simple as usual

• Puzzle time per puzzle: 10-15 minutes
• Riddle time: 60 minutes – open

The fewer clues you use in the puzzles, the less you should expect to race through the EXIT game in record time. The puzzles are not easy – they are for advanced players after all – and you should expect at least 120 minutes as an advanced EXIT player if you are not a professional.

Game Material

In the box of the game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse there are 4 puzzles in separate bags consisting of 88 pieces each. In addition, there are 12 puzzle documents, 2 strange pieces whose purpose is only revealed in the course of the adventure, a decoding disc for assembly and a manual with a detailed help section. In addition, you should have paper, pens, scissors and a clock to stop the time ready, as well as your smartphone.

The accompanying Kosmos-Erklär-App is highly recommended, as it explains the game while you are assembling it, if you don’t want to read the instructions in the booklet. The app also includes a timer and atmospheric music to get you more into the setting.

EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse – the 4 Escape Rooms

The riddles in the puzzle are often combination riddles

There are 4 puzzles in total, where the back of the pieces is printed with a different pattern. This way you can keep the puzzles apart when you do them again (but it is recommended to put them back into the plastic bags separately to save the tedious sorting). Start with the first puzzle, whose motif shows the lighthouse and some locks whose code must be cracked to open them.

The puzzle motifs hide clues for solving the puzzles. The puzzles themselves consist of only 88 pieces each and are easy to put together. If there are several players, you should definitely split up to save time. For example, you can assemble the border in parallel and puzzle individual motifs. With four players, however, you can get in each other’s way. The attraction here is not so much the puzzle itself (as with the EXIT puzzles from Ravensburger, e.g. the Escape Puzzle Dragon Laboratory) but rather the surprising motif that was not on display beforehand or is a quickly grasped picture. You are already occupied with the motifs while doing the puzzle, but it is primarily an EXIT game where the puzzles are in the foreground and the puzzles are secondary.

The story: You are standing on the shore in front of a lighthouse, which is your last rescue from the storm, when suddenly its light goes out. To make matters worse, you make out a ship on the raging sea, heading straight for its doom, lost without the lighthouse’s saving light. You rattle at the door of the lighthouse, but it is locked. But then you discover a strange box with letters and a mysterious disc and the puzzle begins. Your goal: to climb to the top of the lighthouse as quickly as possible, activate the saving light and save the ship.
The mission: Activate the light at the top of the lighthouse and save the ship from impending doom!

Story and Puzzle

The Kosmos app takes the hassle out of reading the instructions

Story and puzzles are at the forefront of the game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse. As soon as you have solved a lock or a puzzle or a combination puzzle correctly, you get the key to open this lock and are rewarded with a puzzle document. The puzzle documents also offer a new way of leading through the story. And that is really successful! With each document, the adventure develops: new clues are revealed and the story progresses. In this way, the EXIT game The Deserted Lighthouse makes up for one of the biggest deficits of many exit and escape games, namely a lack of story. The story here is more puzzle-driven and doesn’t go into much depth, but it still works brilliantly!

The puzzles are all on a high level, we definitely reached our limits with some of them. You definitely need to be focused and think creatively if you want to solve this EXIT game in a good amount of time. As far as the complexity and creativity of the puzzles are concerned, advanced puzzle fans will get their money’s worth here. The game authors have developed a range of different puzzle types with nice variations, which are cracked in a three-digit numerical code, as known from the EXIT games.

If you get stuck, there are two hints to help you find the solution yourself, and the solution can be found in the enclosed booklet. Anyone who masters the mission without any hints has my respect – we didn’t succeed. A nice “treat” in any case is that the puzzle theme also flows into the puzzles and the puzzles are not only put together once, but are even more closely interwoven with the puzzles.

Rating and Conclusion

Right or wrong? The already familiar decoding disc gives it away…

Tight puzzles, a successful story line and puzzle fun in between: In the new variant EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse of the EXIT game series, a lot of things are really new and different. For example, you puzzle together the escape rooms during the mission and are already occupied with the motifs. In addition, the story develops further with the help of the 12 enclosed puzzle documents until the finale and you really get the feeling that you are moving forward in the story. Big plus: we succeeded much better in immersing ourselves in the scenarios, which is great for the fun of playing in a small group.

As with the other EXIT games in the series, you also use up material in the EXIT game The Deserted Lighthouse. So you can’t borrow it or play it repeatedly.

Rating

Pro and Con

Do a puzzle, solve a few puzzles and play through a room and then puzzle again uws. This concept worked great for us because the puzzles are entertaining and a nice breather for the grey cells. In addition, the motifs are beautifully designed. They are kept rather simple, you don’t have to search much to find the puzzles and clues compared to the EXIT puzzles from Ravensburger. Instead, the focus is clearly on ingenious, varied and creative puzzles that lead to the solution in the familiar EXIT game manner as a three-number code.

If there is a problem with the puzzle and you are looking at the ticking stopwatch in panic, there is a well thought-out help system in the booklet consisting of tips and solutions. In this way, you can get help in bits and pieces before the frustration threshold is reached. The stated time of 90 minutes to play through the game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse without a single hint is utopian in our opinion. You need a minimum of 4 x 10 minutes just to do the puzzles, so you still have 50 minutes for the puzzles, some of which require you to think around corners.
Overall, the final evaluation of your crew’s success rewards you if you use fewer aids and bite your way through the game with streamlined grey matter. However, the game authors have actually designed the puzzles so well that they are all comprehensible and solvable. Those who are fit in solving puzzles and playing Escape Games will get their money’s worth.

It is still a pity that some of the material is painted and cut up after playing once. We already know this from the EXIT games in the series, but in a game that also comes with four beautiful puzzles, this is a lot of rubbish that you don’t want to throw away. Because the puzzles remain intact – so I guess the only thing left to do is to look for a creative way to use the puzzle pieces somehow creatively.

For Whom Is the Game Exit the Deserted Lighthouse Worthwhile?

Advanced Escape Game players and puzzle fans will get their money’s worth with the new EXIT game. The description “for advanced players” is definitely to be taken literally. Nevertheless, you should plan on at least 120 minutes of playing time, even as an advanced exit game player, because the puzzles are quite challenging. Those who have been fans of the EXIT game series so far will be thrilled, because the game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse also has a very well-functioning story and at least twice the playing time with challenging puzzles and an additional four puzzles.

120-180 minutes of playing time (or even longer, for example, if you really try to solve all the puzzles on your own without help) may be too long for some people. This EXIT game can therefore become an evening-long programme item, which should be considered for a games evening.

Those who are familiar with the Ravensburger Exit puzzles and love the focus on puzzling will find a completely different concept here. The puzzles are more of an accessory, so this EXIT game is more suitable for puzzle fans than for puzzle fans.

Conclusion

The game EXIT The Deserted Lighthouse is a successful further development of the EXIT games. What is new is that the Escape rooms are puzzled together and there is a functioning story through which the adventure develops atmospherically. The extended playing time and challenging and creative puzzles offer advanced puzzle fans and Escape Room players a challenging adventure. Thumbs up and a clear recommendation for all ambitious puzzle fans and EXIT players!

AngebotBestseller Nr. 1

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Kooperatives Erlebnisspiel im Level: Einsteiger; Mit Tutorial und Timer in der kostenlosen KOSMOS-Erklär-App. Mit und ohne App spielbar

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Your heart beats for Exit games? Ours does too! From card Escape Game Deckscape The Heist in Venice to real Escape Games, we try as much as we can. In keeping with our life motto, life is too short not to play games and spend great moments with your favourite people, there are plenty of ideas on our leisure blog for activities for two, with family and friends.

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