Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8134255/backstories-alone-under-the-ice

Designers: Jules Messaud, Anthony Perone
Publisher: La Boîte de Jeu
Artist: Cyrille Bertin

Backstories: Alone Under the Ice is a clever and fun little narrative detective/mystery style game that’s similar to a point and click experience on a computer. Over the course of the game, you have changing objectives and use items, clues, and action cards to interact with your environment, talk with people, and make decisions. I actually played this twice and enjoyed both playthroughs, but I now feel I’ve seen most of what the game has to offer and I don’t feel the need to play again.

Overall, this game is well done. The items and help cards in the game come in one of two designs: either a text box shape or notches along the card edge. To play, you select one of these cards, place it on the back of one of the panorama (scene) cards, and flip it over to reveal what that card shows on the panorama card. I like the different ways you can use clues and cards to help you and guide you and how each card feels different and can reveal unique information. That said, it’s also possible at certain points you may get stuck and just circle a bit by choosing random card combinations to see what works.

The puzzles in the game are also pretty fun. There’s one I saw both games that I still don’t understand, but the rest of them have been enjoyable to solve with varying levels of difficulty.

The cards themselves are large and pretty high quality with text that is easy to read and pleasant art. The cards do really help set the scene and provide visuals for what’s happening in the story, who you are meeting, what you have at your disposal, and what you can use throughout the game.

You also play as a character that can acquire ailments or other negative effects/attributes along the way based on your decisions which I like.

In terms of player count, I loved it solo, and I can see it working at two and maybe three, but I could easily see it getting overwhelming quickly with too many people.

The game in general is pretty chill, but it can get stressful towards the end. I don’t want to ruin anything, but there is a time aspect that becomes relevant later in the story.

This is a solid game that’s fun, pretty quick, easy to learn, looks great, has neat mechanics, and a well written story but it seriously lacks replayability. I understand that’s essentially the purpose of the game, but I always appreciate games that allow me to come back to them multiple times, which is why we’ve never gotten into escape room style games. Thankfully, this one was cheap and a nice, small box, so it’s not quite as bad!