Love & Board Games: ‘The Morrison Game Factory’ Posts A Curiously Sweet Puzzletale (The NoPro…

Disclosure: creator Lauren Bello is an occasional contributor to No Proscenium. the edition reviewed was a factory test sample provided by the publisher.

Unlike some of the other members of the Review Crew, I’d never played a PostCurious game before the review copy of The Morrison Game Factory appeared at my doorstep. I’d certainly been intrigued, and maybe a little intimidated by the struggles some of the team has had over the years in cracking the puzzles.

Was this going to be a game for puzzlers or a game for those who like a good story?

I’m pleased to say that I think both camps will be happy with The Morrison Game Factory, and as someone who is in the later camp that the story folks will be very, very happy indeed.

The Morrison Game Factory takes the form of a strange collection of board game fragments that have been packaged up in a single box. As the story has it this was discovered by an urban explorer in a decommissioned game factory and sent to us because we’re better at this kind of thing than they are.

What follows from that simple, immersing conceit, is a rather lovely tale about longing and trying to bridge the gap between two souls via a shared secret language of games. I’m hesitant to reveal too much about just where the story goes and who the principle characters are, in short because the act of discovery — of the identities of the principals and the stakes — is part of the relentless charm of the story.

The puzzles, for the most part, aren’t too difficult so much as they are sometimes involved. By which I mean they can take a little time to work through but don’t require great leaps of logic or context. For the most part. I did find an early, in some ways the first real puzzle, to be a bit of a skill check. I couldn’t quite get my brain to kick into the frame of the game at first, and wound up touching base with the hint system to get me going.

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Indeed for a moment I felt adrift, and I was having visions of From Soft video games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) and how I’ve bounced off those dance in my head. But once I cleared that hurdle, effectively unthawing my brain, the rest of the game snapped into place for me. I wonder if this is normal when playing puzzle games, for the brain freeze to set in at first, or if this “skill check” is part of Post Curious’ signature.

Once it gets going Morrison is a sometimes bittersweet ride through a tale whose mid-century classic board game aesthetics give the whole experience a unique tone. The world that creator Lauren Bello builds here is so specific, and in her writing it’s a world that feels lived in and even a little expansive even as it focuses itself on just a pair of characters. You know exactly where and when you are while playing the game. Perhaps it’s to be expected of a Nebula award nominated TV writer (The Sandman) who is known to be a puzzle/box game fanatic. In any case: all that is to our benefit.

Like the best of the genre The Morrison Game Factory feels like a story unfolding in something like real-time. As elements of the backstory are revealed there’s a component of the tale advancing in the present as well. Some of that is leveraged through the app component of the game, which nails its own early computing aesthetic.

Most pleasing of all, from a production standpoint, are the game pieces and elements in the box. It feel like someone constructed a “message in a bottle” out of leftover scraps from a game factory, and that commitment to the bit (academic translation: intelligent use of diegetic narrative components) just grounds the fanciful elements of the story in a way that makes things feel “real” even if they’re not strictly plausible.

So with one simple box I’ve going from post curious to post enthusiastic about the work published by Rita Orlov and hope that it’s successful enough that the company, which has been self-publishing Orlov’s own inventive pieces so far, keeps expanding its own catalog of Puzzletales and roster of tale spinners at this high level of quality.

The Morrison Game Factory: A Puzzletale is now funding on Kickstarter. Pre-orders start at $39 for a box.

Check out Patrick McLean’s interview with Post Curious’ Rita Orlov and The Morrison Game Factory creator Lauren Bello on our podcast.

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