Thames & KosmosExit: The Sacred Temple (Puzzle)

Excellent game and quality. It’s just to be played once as it’s an escape game, for best experience download their app for some music effect. Worth the purchase. Enjoy!

This game is very entertaining and fun to play with a group of people who like hieroglyphs. The inconvenient is that it is for one use only.

Loved it! Best single player board game! Only downside is it can only be played once.

This was our first time playing these type of games, and so the concept was quite new to me and my friends. It took us quite some time just to understand how it was supposed to work, as the instructions weren't clear enough; that in itself was a puzzle! But once we got the hang of it, we had a great time! It kept us entertained for 2 hours. Some puzzles unraveled as the game went on which is great because sometimes it would throw you off, keeping you trying to solve other puzzles for longer!! The final puzzle was the toughest!The only downside is the main booklet. Sharing a tiny booklet between 5 isn't actually great - if there were 2 copies of the booklet, to share around, it would've been better! Especially since some of the puzzles are in the book, you have to wait til friends are done looking at it to look at it yourself. The tiny size requires you to have good eyesight too, it should've been printed bigger as I think some people will struggle with it.

I needed and advent calendar for my 11 year old and Amazon features literally hundreds of advent calendars. So I eliminated the ones with alcohol, the ones with jams, the ones with chocolate & sweets (because we all open advent calendars first thing and breakfast is the one meal of the day that I don't think should include extra sugar and tooth rot), the ones with plastic tat and the ones with tiny makeup pots with little content but a lot of wasteful packaging. And behold, hundreds of choices came down to two - the calendar full of flower seeds and this one.The premise is that on Dec 1st you have become trapped in an escape adventure and each day brings a puzzle to get you to the next door (and you don't know which is the next door, only the 1st is labelled). There is a clever little checker that lets you know if you've correctly solved the puzzle, a pad of daily clues plus a pad of daily hints and tips (and, if all else fails, a solution).The box and accompanying booklets are very well made, and almost 100% fully recyclable. You'll need scissors for some days and I recommend a little torch for shining into each day's box to see some of the more subtle clues. There is variety in the nature of the puzzles, my daughter loved pitting her wits each day against the puzzle writers, and we worked as a team so it was a family event. And there was even an entertaining twist in the tale at the end of the calendar. The only note of caution I would sound is don't open that day's window if you need to be out of the door for school in two minutes time.No it isn't particularly Christmassy but my daughter declared it the best advent calendar ever and I agree with her. Would love it if the manufacturers did another one for 2022 - guaranteed customer here.

Updated review - this is an utterly amazing fantastic wonderful escape room advent calendar, truly amazing. Extremely well made, challenging and very very very unique. Totally exceeded my expectations! Don’t want to give anything away but you end up using the whole advent calendar and there are really clever puzzles/props which require some crafting skills! The daily story/scene setter is amusing and the solutions for each are given in three levels so you can just ‘cheat a little bit’. Thoroughly recommend for family advent fun - my tweens found it hard but loved to sit at kitchen table with me to try and crack three puzzles. I hope they bring out a new one for 2022!I love escape games (and have several of tris brand) and this advent looks brilliant. I kept looking for one each year but they were always in German so was thrilled to see this English version. I bought this for me really but I will give it to my husband for advent!

As soon as we saw that Exit had launched a new style of escape-room type game we had to try it. We've played all of their existing range up to the most recent release, and while we've enjoyed all of them the chance to try something where the gameplay is a little different was very welcome.Those familiar with standard Exit Games will find some things familiar here (the code disc) but other things in 'The Deserted Lighthouse' are very different (no cards, no book). All rooms are played out via 4 jigsaws, which you complete one by one as the game progresses. As you complete puzzles and solve clues you'll receive further documents to help you on your way, either providing new puzzles or evidence, or directing you to start a new jigsaw.We really enjoyed this game. It took us a little while to get going at first, but once you get into the game the experience is very similar to the previous games but with added fun. We picked the harder of the two games on the market but we should have tried the easier one first, as we did need a few hints, but we'll go back and play that one soon.I particularly liked that several of the puzzles rely on/use the jigsaws themselves as part of the solution, it's not just that you complete them and look at the picture every time. Once you get your head around that it helps going forward to complete the further puzzles.The games are a bit longer than previous games due to the jigsaw aspect, we completed the game in around 2 hours. I'm sure others could do it quicker. I'd recommend doing some of the smaller games first if you're a beginner to get used to the process.

We have played all the earlier games in the series from Markus and Inka - from beginner to expert - and enjoyed them all immensely.But there's a saying: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We found this game convoluted, overly complicated, and hard to follow. Some of the puzzles were misleading ("each ship has a special place" - no, they go in randomly), and even a few of the solutions were incoherent, and we couldn't fathom the explanation after numerous reads. The jigsaws added a new and enjoyable bit of variety, but the puzzles were random.If they develop some new games in the old series, we'll definitely play them. But this new style was not a winner for us.