Case Closed: Director’s Cut | Review

Case Closed Director’s Cut Review | Join the Bureau of External Affairs in a series of smaller, 60 Minute games. Your new office at the Bureau is waiting for you, filled with pinboards, equipment, and a database of highly classified info. These will help you crack each case. In Director’s Cut, a professional hitman crashes a Hollywood party on a private island. Who was the target? Who sent the killer? And how did they pull this off?

Date Played: September 2025
Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Number of Players: 3
Difficulty: Medium-Hard

All photos in this review are (c) Case Closed

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to review Case Closed’s “Brief Cases” (as they used to be called) lately. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it since the creators Ronan and Oran first mentioned the concept to me, and long before I’d even played one of them. They fall into the category of “an escape room that’s not quite an escape room” with a dash of “jubensha replayability“. When I describe it to friends I settle somewhere on “real life detective simulator“.

The concept is simple: The Bureau of External Affairs is one room located onsite at Case Closed. This room is decked out like a detective’s office. It’s got a liquids testing station, tools for fingerprint and residue testing, a cabinet of folders and documents on anything from poisons to firearms, it’s got a white board, a cork board, and loads of red string… Basically everything a detective could possibly need to solve their case. As a player, rather than book this space out and solve one escape room, you can choose from a number of cases. One such case is Director’s Cut and, at the time of writing there’s also one called Deep Cover. When starting your case, you’ll be given the documents and ephemera of that particular case, and left to your own inside the room in a kind of self-guided mystery. If that sounds like your run of the mill tabletop murder mystery game, it isn’t. Well okay, it kind of is. But you can’t, because everything you need to solve the case will be found in the room.

So why is this like an escape room? Well it’s a physical room and it’s got puzzles, and locks and keys and cool things to do. Why is this like a jubensha then? Well, you can chose from a catalogue of games, making the space utterly replayable and therefore a pretty genius idea from an escape room point of view. At the end of the day as an escape room owner, you can have the most dedicated fanbase in the world but once they’ve played all your rooms they’ve reached maximum lifetime spend and thats it, unless you want to build a new escape room. Case Closed are possibly one of the first UK escape rooms to design something that might be a remedy to that, and as someone who talks / writes / evangelises on the topic often, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the start of an industry-wide trend.

So now that’s the concept out of the way, how enjoyable is it? Well… Very much so, in it’s novelty! But the format can (and certainly will be if I know how hard and how well the designers work) be improved. It’s tricky to say if I loved it as much as I enjoyed the company’s escape rooms, but there are many reasons – and most of them personally complicated – as to why that might be the case. So I’ll stick to being objective. With a game style like this there isn’t a whole pre-existing “this is how to do a game like this” so there will naturally be things which can be smoothed out.

The parts I loved? How well everything fit together logically. I need to figure out who handled a gun and when it was fired? No problem, with a little straightforward thinking and looking at the tools available, you’ll figure it out. I also loved using red string on the corkboard, and holding up little maps to the light. It really emulated the sense of being a detective and figuring something out. Diegetically, everything just worked so well. There were no artificial puzzles blocking my progress, only my own knowledge of the case and the characters within it.

What didn’t work so well? Some of the pacing and difficulty felt a little bumpy, and there were moments I felt myself and my team-members flagging. There’s a lot of reading, and you really have to understand and interogate all aspects of the story. You can’t just solve puzzles to get to the end, you have to really pay attention and understand the story. And, hey! It’s hard to tell a really good story in just 60 minutes – for pulling this off, I have to congratulate them. But the less I say about the story in this review the better. After all, the story itself is the puzzle, and I don’t want to accidentally reveal a spoiler.

What about other cool things worth shouting out about? Well, the clue delivery system, and stage-general gating of the experience was pretty impressive! I mentioned before that Director’s Cut is self-guided. Throughout that, you have access to a computer terminal where, at the other end of the terminal is an “agent in the field” who validates your answers and offers suggestions along the way. The content of this is pre-recorded, but they do a really good job of setting the scene, creating a sense of urgency in the narrative, and making sure you’re investigating the right things in the right order. Murder mysteries are daunting at the best of time, and it’s a great entry-level to have a terminal that asks the right questions in the right order for the story to unfold.

We played as a team of three at the end of a long day doing tourist stuff around the city. It’s the type of game you probably want to be fresh for, so in hindsight walking 25,000 steps then going into Director’s Cut was a choice given there are only two chairs in the room. But that brings me to another point of interest. When comparing Director’s Cut to a traditional escape room, there’s the question of whether this is a game best played solo, in pairs, or whether you want to get the whole four-person escape room crew in for it. Because you can! This room has a maximum of four players and based on our three player team, it’d work well in four too. But I also think it’d work really well in a team of one, and you absolutely can book it for one. A delightful concept I genuinely wish more escape rooms embraced.

Director’s Cut: The Verdict

So cool. I love the concept and I desperately want Case Closed to make more of these. I want to play hundred of them, and I want to collect little badges along the way (not a thing they do yet, but I think I’m going to type it out in the hopes they read this review and go “yeah you know what we do need little badges” so I can add to my unwieldy escape room badge collection). As a first game of this style, it’s not perfect, but it’s incredibly promising for what the genre and format can do in the future and as an innovation, I’m excited.

In terms of who I’d recommend this for, I’d recommend it anyone who really likes a good story. Especially for small groups or solo players who like an escape room not just for the puzzles but for the whole experience. It’s probably not a good game for kids, unless the child has an excellent attention span, but I don’t know your child so thats up to you to make that kind of judgement. And surprisingly unlike 99% of escape rooms I’ve played, this one I’d actually love to bring my parents and grandparents to. The gentler pace and more deep concentration needed would be right up their street. So if you’ve been looking for something to introduce your puggle (puzzle muggle) relatives, this would be a great shout.

Note, we were not charged for our game but this hasn’t affected the contents of our review.

Director’s Cut can be booked in Edinburgh by heading to Case Closed’s website here.