Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: This point-and-click adventure by Tim Betrand seems a little daunting at first, but with a little bit of deductive reasoning, you can make it out alive. The game itself doesn’t involve a long drawn out series of clicking and finding objects like some adventures. Instead you have one major task…to get inside the box and find a way to deactivate the bomb. You only have 15 minutes of real time to accomplish this task.

You will mostly have to put your number logic to work to make it through. The notes and etchings inside the box provide you with most of the information you need to deduce the next step, but it still takes a little thinking and a bit of trial and error to make it through in time. Starting with the combination lock, you immediately will thank yourself for all those games of Mastermind, but the game will test other areas of knowledge including multiplication and binary numbering systems.

If you don’t make it through in time, you will blow up, but you can always try again. Another unique feature of this game is that each time you play, the combinations and some of the puzzle solutions change. So you can’t rely on memorizing the sequences, but have to start fresh each time. In that sense, the game has some replay value, although once you’ve done it, you probably won’t need to go right back and do it again. The game won’t drag on forever. You really can solve it in just a few minutes if you put your mind to it, so give it a shot and see if you can work under pressure to disarm the package.