Room Escape Artist

The Medieval Mishap is included in our recommendation guide for Tabletop Escape Games. For more of the best remote escape games in this style, check out the recommendation guide.

Tilt True in This Time Tourney

Location:  at home

Date Played: March 16, 2025

Team size: 1-5; we recommend 2-4

Duration: 2-3 hours

Price: about £24

REA Reaction

Family puzzle games pose a tricky design challenge. To truly engage their eclectic audience, they must accommodate a wide range of attention spans and puzzling capabilities. Too often, the result seems overly simplistic and process-oriented at the expense of depth and discovery. The Medieval Mishap defied these stereotypes, delivering a highly approachable experience that was still full of challenge, ahas, beauty, and humor, proving that a single game can indeed satisfy both adults and kids at the same time.

The materials and presentation were superb, deftly balancing rich detail with clarity of purpose. We could all admire the artwork without getting lost in our search tasks, a duality that is exceptionally important for less forgiving players like children. This game got it right, enabling us to earn discovery without frustration.

This elegant backdrop set the stage for a gauntlet of unique puzzles that offered effective collaboration opportunities between my 12-year-old and myself. It’s easy for family games to lean on pure process puzzles to avoid frustrating kids, but here the delight and challenge were in figuring out how we would approach tasks. Nothing was straightforward, but everything was approachable enough for my daughter to meaningfully contribute. While I could have finished more quickly, the content still interested me; I would have enjoyed playing this with my husband. The key to this broad appeal was in giving us clear starting points for experimentation with the puzzles. Even if we didn’t immediately know how everything would come together, we could take a first step, get information, and see what we could do with it. This kind of immediate-though-incomplete gratification built momentum but left questions, satisfying eager kids while still leaving a bit of mystery for everyone.

The game also didn’t skimp on narrative, developing its story through both dialogue and a lengthy meta-task. A web app presented much of this narrative through audio clips from various cartoon characters, which was a highlight of the experience for my daughter. Sometimes the characters offered more flavor text than the gameplay warranted, but the audio delivery coupled with a dry sense of humor made this palatable. In retrospect, it’s clear that this dialogue rounded out the historical nature of the game, conveying aspects of medieval life without crossing the line into overt education. Players will get a well-rounded sense of the time period without even trying.

For an experience that genuinely entertains your whole family, The Medieval Mishap is top-notch. This installment hooked us on the series, and we’ve eagerly backed the next game, The Roman Rivalry, on Kickstarter, with confidence in more family fun.

Who is this for?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Knights, alchemists, and/or time travelers
• Families and other multi-aged teams (ages 8 and up as long as players can read)

Why play?

• For a gorgeous, well-crafted multi-generational puzzling experience that will satisfy young and old alike

Story

Gwen, a Junior Agent for the Ministry of Time (MoT), had detected the illegal use of modern technology in the year 1345 and rashly time-traveled there on her own to check it out. Lance Steele, the Deputy Director of the MoT (and Gwen’s uncle) needed our help to guide his own time-traveling expedition in her pursuit. Our job was to “decrypt” the dossier of artifacts and notes that Gwen had left behind and communicate our findings to Lance.

Setup

Deducing our credentials from some introductory documents, we logged into a web app that guided us through the rest of the experience. Although we were presented with an overflowing folder full of materials, each puzzle indicated which subset to focus on. We entered solutions into the web app, which gave immediate feedback if corrections were necessary. The app also offered a set of hints for each puzzle.

Gameplay

History Mystery’s The Medieval Mishap was a family-oriented play-at-home escape game with a moderate level of difficulty for that audience.

Gameplay consisted of searching, making connections, and a significant amount of reasoning and deduction. Players need to be able to read in order to participate meaningfully in most puzzles.

Analysis

➕ The materials were numerous, rich, and well-constructed, and the game gated access to them well. We used a few key objects throughout most puzzles, a design decision that provided continuity to the puzzling and a sense of place for our explorations. A humongous map was exceedingly impressive in both its illustrative quality and the creatively varied ways in which we used it.

➕ Because each puzzle incorporated several of these materials, the game supported multiplayer collaboration better than most. Heck, just scanning that glorious map for information could occupy a whole team simultaneously.

➕ Each puzzle drew us in with quick wins that eased us into harder work. This kept varying skill levels engaged.

➖ The web app on our iPad often wouldn’t let us submit answers while the screen keyboard was active, sometimes forcing us to refresh the page. One time we even had to restart the whole game. Fortunately, we’d written down most of our answers.

➕/➖ The narrative was interesting and well-delivered through spoken dialogue, evolving during the game via mysterious comments and reveals. However, the ongoing premise of informing Lance Steele’s investigation via some kind of futuristic communication device rather than directly participating ourselves was convoluted and left us wondering how we also interacted with all of the 14th century characters that were key to our success. I replayed part of the game to try to explain this…and I still can’t.

➖ A late-game meta puzzle was woefully redundant with earlier efforts, especially when we hadn’t preserved all our answers. Even with adequate note-taking beforehand, the new tasks seemed to repeat earlier processes rather than requiring new thought.

➕ The finale stepped just far enough outside the game’s established mechanics to challenge us in a fresh way while still honoring the rest of the game. It was an intellectually delightful conclusion without requiring excessive effort, which was much appreciated after three hours of intense gameplay. 

➕/➖ It took my kid almost three hours to complete the game (mostly on her own), a good amount of play time for the price. However, for the audience, this might be too long to hold attention within a single sitting. Just don’t close the web app if you need to break your play into multiple sessions…and write down your answers, just in case.

➕ Like the The Egyptian Enigma, the game rewarded additional exploration with a bit of tantalizing intrigue, enough for my daughter to declare, “Now I need to play ALL these games….” Mission accomplished, History Mysteries…well done!

Tips For Players

• Space Requirements: A large table or floor space
• Required Gear: A pencil or pen, paper

Buy your copy of History Mystery’s The Medieval Mishap, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: History Mystery provided a complimentary game.