Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein: The Body in the Suitcase | Review

The Body in the Suitcase Review | Do you have what it takes to solve a gruesome mystery? An ominous suitcase thought to contain a number of body parts and personal effects has been discovered at Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein. You have just 45 minutes to solve the riddle and identify who lies within and why. This new puzzle-based challenge is suitable for groups of up to six people and is guranteed to have you in stitches!

Date Played: March 2024
Time Taken: ~30 minutes
Number of Players: 5
Difficulty: Easy

Second in our Mary Shelley’s House of Frankeinstein day, and breaking up the two large escape rooms was The Body in the Suitcase. This is one of the two “tabletop escape rooms” available at Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein and compacts down into the size of one large suitcase. The other, which we didn’t try this time, is the Christmas themed present box “The Gift”.

If you want to hear more about what sort of puzzley experiences there are at the museum and what to expect, we’ve written up a much more detailed rundown in this review of The Shallows here.

About The Body in the Suitcase

Being a tabletop game means this game can be played more or less anywhere, but for our session we were invited into the on-site bar, The Bloody Mary’s bar. It being fairly early in the daytime meant it wasn’t open to the public and serving drinks. I get the impression it’s probably mostly used for evening events and special occasions but by the time you read this review that may have changed. In any case, this was great for us as we had the whole run of the place to really spread out and solve the puzzles.

The Bloody Mary’s Bar – photo our own

The story goes that a mysterious suitcase was found deep within the basement, which after having seen the space to play The Shallows I definitely believe, and the museum discovered a body inside. The exterior is locked with a code, and the suitcase is covered in strange clues that all point to the identity of both the victim andthe murder. The museum don’t want a dead body on their hand so the story goes they’re thinking about getting rid of the suitcase, but decided to let us have a go at solving the case before they do. So without further ado, we “dug in”…

Opening up the Suitcase

In terms of puzzles and gameplay style, The Body in the Suitcase was a very non-linear game. In fact, after getting through the very first puzzle of how to get inside we were off to a flying start and our team of 5 all split up to work on different things on different tables.

Besides some quite fun components (which I’m not spoiling anything by saying are true to the game’s name), most of the actual puzzles were based on sheets of paper, rolled up scrolls, some crypexes and locked boxes, and small pieces of ephemera that fit inside a suitcase. Everything was well-labelled, and it was easy enough to follow what to do.

The puzzles were your standard puzzle-fare within that. A number of mathematicaly puzzles, a tangram, some moments of aha when you overlaid part A onto part B and so on. The puzzles themselves might not have objectively fit into their constructed universe (after all, why would a murderer hide the code to the locked box on a mathematical puzzle tucked into a pocket in the suitcase), but I don’t mind suspending my disbelief. At the end of the day, we all had a lot of fun solving the puzzles, so I’ll forgive the lack of mimesis.

Our mission was twofold:

• Uncover the identity of the victim
• Uncover the identity of the murderer

And delightfully… This was no easy feat! Even after solving all of the puzzles, we still had to really read, study and understand the evidence before making our final verdict. It was a well-crafted story with twists and turns we enjoyed puzzling over.

Accessibility and Clues

The Body in the Suitcase, similar to The Shallows is an un-GMed game. Meaning you’re more or less left to your own devices but the Games Master will be available if you need it. In our case, our Games Master was James (his real name, and not his character name). Once we were ready to make our accusation, all we needed to do was find James and tell him the truth.

In terms of accessibility, since this is a portable game it is in theory fully accessible to folks with limited mobility. In reality, much of Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein has steps, and so you’d need to reach out to them directly to arrange playing it in an accessible location. In terms of other accessibility, there are no colour puzzles and nothing frightening other than the theme of murder and fake body parts.

The Verdict

In all, I really enjoyed The Body in the Suitcase. Whilst sure, the individual puzzles themselves could have been better integrated into the story, that minor “escape room brain” suggestion is outweighed by glancing around at my other 4 players and seeing how much everyone was getting into the puzzles and how delighted folks were when they solved something. So I can’t fault it!

It was possibly my favourite of the three – although it’s hard to judge it in the same way as the physical environments since tabletop and escape room are not the same.

In terms of value I believe – and couldn’t find anything to contradict this – that your booking of the game also comes with free entry into the museum. In this way, it’s great value if you plan to also explore the museum, which is good fun too.

If you’d like to play The Body in the Suitcase, you can check it out on Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein here.

Note: We weren’t charged for our experience, but we have not let this affect the contents of this review.