Scooby-Doo and Mystery, Inc. are here to solve another mystery. The first in a new series of Coded Chronicles Games, Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion encapsulates all of the tropes from the classic show in a fun cooperative, escape room-style game.
Taking control of the gang, you explore the mansion room by room looking for clues. Together you use a character’s specific action to interact with the room: Scooby Sniffs, Velma Researches, Daphne Uses, Fred Investigates, and of course Shaggy Eats. A corresponding booklet goes with each character where you will look up the number associated with that action. It’s a unique and easy way to do this. The captions are well written and often very funny. To keep players from brute-forcing through it, there are several consequences if you do the wrong thing- so be careful!
The clue deck is extremely well laid out and versatile. Without spoiling anything, the clues often contain a closer look at something, a useful item, a suspect, or an alternate part of the room. The large cards allow for the versatility of these clues and feel significant when turning one over. All of the characters, puzzles, and settings are hidden until you reveal them. They all feel right out of a classic Scooby-Doo episode.
Unfortunately, you can only really play it once since it has one story path. It would have been great to have a few different clue packs or even difficulty scaling for the game to give it some replay value. At the price point of $29.99, it is a bit steep for a 2-3 hour game. It is easy enough to reset the game, so I ended up giving our copy to a friend to enjoy.
One other negative was that there were several typos in our copy. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue, but these typos were with the numbers and made us unable to obtain a few clues at times. Other typos told us to discard a few clues that we actually needed in the next room. This is an easy fix in future printings, but something to be aware of going into the game.
All in all it was a fun game to play for the evening and definitely recommend it to fans of Scooby and the escape room genre.
Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion is a spooky 7 out of 10!
Look for Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion in stores now!
Check out other The OP Games, including the second Coded Chronicles based on The Shining, here: theop.games
Kyle Dodson is a writer, comedian, Rock Solid Podcast producer, Batman aficionado, facial hair connoisseur, and oxford comma supporter.