Divergent Games: Mystery and Moonshine | Review

Mystery and Moonshine Review | It’s 1931 rum-runners and bootleggers have mostly kept the city supplied with sub-standard gut-rot gin and bathtub bourbon. Now a large shipment of top-quality Mississippi Moonshine vanished from Capones dockland warehouse. He called on his ‘old pal’ private investigator Mick Macy.

Date Played: February 2024
Number of Players: 3
Difficulty: Easy
Time Taken: 26:34

Having lived in Edinburgh a couple of years now, I’m finally willing to admit that I’ve exhausted all the local escape rooms. Further an issue when escape room friends come to visit *cough cough* as team Escaping the Closet are coming to stay in a few days, when I can recommend rooms but I cannot join them. So when I hear about a hidden gem located just a short train ride outside of Edinburgh, I had to go check them out. This hidden gem was Divergent Games, and it was recommended by a recent friend, who’d heard from a friend (who probably heard from another friend but who knows), that they were well worth checking out. On a whim, we booked train tickets on a rainy weekend morning to pop over to the nearby city and give the rooms a go.

I noticed a few things whilst booking all three rooms at Divergent. The first was they seemed fairly unused to enthusiast booking habits. I think we might well have been the first team ever to want to play all three back to back, even though we understood that their booking system had set timeslots and so their system put an hour gap inbetween each (picture the first at 1pm, second at 3pm, third at 5pm). It took a little back and forth to try to convince them that yes, we really did want to go from one directly into the other. I held back from mentioning we probably wouldn’t use the full hour to escape, because that’s just tempting fate now. A sure fire way for the universe to ensure we did not escape… But we did manage to secure an “if we can, we’ll let you go straight into the next one“. The second thing I noticed was that they didn’t take payment at time of booking. Surprising, but ultimately a good thing since one of our teammates got sick on the day and so we were a player short that thankfully we hadn’t paid for yet.

Once the admin side was out of the way, all that was left to do was to eat a delicious lunch in Edinburgh (the New Town Fox in Dundas Street, if anyone is looking for a recommendation) before hopping on the train out to Falkirk.

Stepping into the Moonshine…

Divergent Games is located very close to one of the two train stations in Falkirk, making it super easy to get to on public transport. On arrival, we were greeted by our enthusiastic Games Master who was to be our host for all three games, then lead into the large, ground floor briefing area to wait. There are plenty of toilets, and you sign the waivers by scanning a QR code in the lobby and selecting your session. On the day we played, they were also training a junior Games Master, so we technically had two Games Masters. Not usually noteworthy, but the two were excellent in tandem and it made resetting the rooms and prepping for our next room extra seamless.

Mystery and Moonshine was the first of the three escape rooms we played at Falkirk and without a doubt my favourite of the three. It began in a fun little on-theme corridor complete with a Mick Macy’s Private Detective door at the end. Our mission was simple. The year was 1931, prohibition was at it’s peak, and a large shipment of moonshine had vanished. But the alcohol wasn’t the only thing to have vanished, the private detective, Mick Macy himself, also disappeared from the scene. It was up to us as the B Team to go into the detective’s office and figure out what Mick Macy had uncovered.

It’s your classic 1930s noir, prohibition-esque experience, and the room was themed perfectly for it. An old wooden desk, a vintage typewriter and empty bottles with XXX scribbled on the side. Anything that puts me in the shoes of being a detective is a big thumbs up from me, and in this respect Mystery and Moonshine did not disappoint.

In terms of the puzzles, Mystery and Moonshine is rather lock-heavy. The desk took the central space in the experience and we spent a large portion of our time finding locked boxes and locked cases and placing them on the desk for the rest of the team to see. In most cases, these were digit locks. Think 3, 4, 5 digit codes and a few letter locks too. There were subtle hints around the room as to which puzzle unlocked which box, and the game played out in a fairly linear fashion. We found a puzzle, inputted the code, and got the clue that pointed to the next puzzle and so on. In this sense, it was a fairly classic Gen 1 escape room with a sprinkling of one or two more exciting pieces of tech that I’ll not mention as not to spoil them. But being Gen 1 in this case isn’t a bad thing, since the locks and boxes fit so nicely with the theme.

The meta puzzle, that is, the “big thing” we were working towards however was much more detective-y. You see, we still had to find that moonshine… And where we found the moonshine, we’d be sure to find Mick Macy too. Throughout the course of the game we got clues as to the culprit’s identity. These ranged from old police line-up snapshots of eyes, noses and mouths, to actual clues as to what attributes our guilty party might have so we could construct the face as we went.

Overall, these two portions of the room fit very nicely together, scratching both portions of my brain. The lizard brain part that just wants to search around a room for keys and codes, and then the detective brain that could take a few steps back and see the bigger picture. Combine with a fun storyline that made sense as went along, and a particularly delightful ending, and you have the recipe of a really solid escape room game. Talk about an unexpected hidden gem!

Making Our Great Escape & Dramatic Exit

…And what a dramatic exit it was too! Despite being a little under caffeinated and it being our first of the day, we knocked it out of the part with a record score of 26 minutes. At the time of writing, this puts our team at #2 in the all time leader board. Fingers crossed we can hold onto the lead for a little longer.

It’s safe to say that after performing that well, the team at Divergent Games felt pretty happy to put us in the next room immediately afterwards which, conveniently, was immediately next door to the room we’d just been in and themed very similarly – this time as a speakeasy bar instead of a detective’s office. But if you want to find out how we fared in the next one – you’ll have to come back and read our next review!

As a final verdict, I’d recommend this game for just about anyone. For anyone living in or travelling to Edinburgh, Falkirk really isn’t that much further and if you have some extra time after doing the popular Edinburgh rooms, you can’t go wrong than popping over to try out Divergent Games’ Mystery and Moonshine. In terms of size, it’s probably most appropriate for a team of 4. Any larger and you’d have too many cooks in the kitchen, and any fewer and you might struggle to finish everything in time.

Mystery and Moonshine can be played at Divergent Games in Falkirk, Scotland.