Came across this today. 

https://www.huntakiller.com/

It's a subscription based fictional murder mystery game. They ship you clues monthly and you have to figure out who the killer is, I guess is the gist of it. Anyone tried it, use it? Seems like fun but at $30/month, I'd want it to be good. 

Perhaps the best way to do it is with like a few friends. Set a night when the box arrives to dive in for hours, and each friend takes turns fronting the $30 each month. 

My wife got this for me for my birthday about a month ago. It's a lot of fun. Also after learning more about it, the founder of the company is a Baltimore native, 15 year Navy vet, a UMD grad, and the company is headquartered in Baltimore, if those kinds of things influence your purchasing decisions. (Wish I would have posted this when people might have been thinking about gift ideas).

If you like escape rooms and the like, things like decoding ciphers to uncover clues, you'll like this a lot. I guess they do new story every "season", the one we have is featured on the front page of the site. https://www.huntakiller.com/

Monthly delivery, the story is 6 episodes, meaning 6 boxes of clues/evidence, 1 box a month. But after we finished the first box, they give you the option to send the next one right away, and just charge you then instead of a month later. So you aren't locked into a 6 month game if you want to power through it. We did the first box, ordered the second right away, but am waiting for the third one on schedule until after the holidays. In their shop you can also order previous seasons as a bundle if a particular synopsis tickles your fancy.

It's very immersive. "Police are not making it a priority case", so the theatre owners hire a PI (us). Each box so far has had 8-10 pieces of evidence. Plus the letter from the "private investigation firm" you work for has a website that you use includes more pieces of evidence. I've started a word document to keep a timeline of events, connect people that are linked. If you had a cork board, index cards, and yarn like in the basement on "The Wire", that would be ideal. 

They give you the objective for each episode. For example: eliminate at least one suspect by confirming their alibi. You comb through all the evidence, decode the ciphers and other puzzles. Once you figure out the objective, you email them the answer the objective asks for, and you get the reply instantly that tells you you're right (or wrong), some final thoughts, and to keep an eye out for your next box. 

They do a good job of keeping you engaged as in between boxes you might get an email or two from "the story" that look like a newsletter from the theatre in the story. Might be nothing, might have clues. Or an email from the firm you work for that might have some thoughts concerning one of the pieces of the new evidence coming your way. So it kinda keeps you thinking about the case, and gets you amped up for that box to show up on your doorstep in the coming days. 

All in all, going through all the evidence (reading everything word for word) takes about an hour (Full on police reports, forensics reports, newspaper articles, etc...) in between you are connecting dots, and taking notes, and before you know it 2-3 hours pass. Once you get into trying to decode things, that takes another couple hours. It's deep, and for something you're subscribing to, you wouldn't want a box to take you only 30 minutes. So far the two boxes we've gotten we've started one day for a few hours, I would figure the ciphers out (not my wife's kind thing) for another hour or two. We went back the next day, went over everything related to the objective for an hour or so and finished up. Looks like 6 "episodes' equals 10-15 hours of gameplay, but it's gonna be more than that for us. Maybe I'm going too deep into the weeds trying not to miss anything. 

Anyway, it's a lot of fun. Seems like the kind of thing that would have grown in popularity during Covid since it's the perfect in-house time waster to occupy your mind elsewhere for a while. Hope the company has grown. Can see myself doing more of these in the future. Looks like many of the bundles in the shop are out of stock which could be a good thing, or a bad thing. Hopefully a good thing. Genius idea, IMO.

I asked two years ago, long time has past, anyone else do one of these yet?