I played the Dark Reflections DLC for Mansions of Madness, and this is my review of it. My short spoiler-free summary is that Dark Reflections is an intriguing investigative adventure with a highly engaging story. This review contains spoilers about situations in the adventure, but not the plot.
Dark Reflections is DLC for the Mansions of Madness game, not an expansion set. That means you can buy Dark Reflections on Steam and play it with just the base Mansions of Madness set. Should you own expansions, Dark Reflections can make use of assets from those sets, but you don't need anything more than just the core box.
At the time of writing, I've played Dark Reflections twice. My first game used these investigators:
It wasn't the best team, as it turns out, but I think it's part of the game's balance that you don't really know what abilities to favour until you play a scenario. I did beat the scenario, but barely. Father Mateo and William Yorick were insane and dead before the end, and Leo and Preston were both insane.
For my second game, I shamelessly min-maxed based on what I knew of the adventure:
They did much better, but mostly because I metagamed and took only the Search Tokens required for the scenario, and then forcing the endgame. This didn't change the outcome of the game, which is definitely one of this scenario's weaknesses. This is exactly one adventure. Your job is investigate and survive, and no matter what you do the end is the same. It's almost a dungeon crawl, but without wandering monsters and only minimal randomness.
That's not so say it's a bad adventure. It's a fun scenario, but it's most fun on the first playthrough. There's not much to this scenario. After you've played it once, you've probably seen everything it has to offer. I'm of the opinion that "bad" Mansions of Madness is no Mansions of Madness, so I'm happy that this scenario exists, and I do view it as strong material for a hosted game, where a game master introduces new story elements. Before I list my ideas for how to add variety to this adventure, I'll review the adventure as written.
Ada Miller was a reporter, until she inherited her Great Aunt's mansion, and moved there to become a novelist. At first, she's excited with her new home and her new life. She messages her publisher frequently about the progress she's making on setting up her home. But then one day, she sents a message to her publisher that she's abandoning the mansion and plans to return to the city, and requests that they arrange an apartment for her. Her message says she'll be on the next available train. And that's the last anyone has heard from her.
You have been hired to locate Ada Miller.
When you arrive at her Great Aunt's mansion, you find it to be an aging home with some signs of minor renovations. It's clear that Ada had been working to tidy up the place, but was probably a little overwhelmed by the size of the place. There are sheets draped over furnishings, and some rooms have been dusted and appear lived in, while others look like they haven't been used since well before Ada's Great Aunt died.
As usual in Mansions of Madness, the main mechanic for investigation in Dark Reflections is the Search token. You roam through the house, pick stuff up, collect items, and read journals and notes. This is also the primary vehicle for the narrative. Most of the mystery in Dark Reflections is forensic. You're investigating something that has, for the most part, already happened.
I started catching on to the mystery's immediate answer pretty quickly, but I didn't figure out what was really going on until it was basically too late. It was fun wandering around the mansion even though I suspected I'd solved the riddle, and I was happy to continue my investigation. The problem, however, at least in retrospect, is that there doesn't seem to be a way to pronounce your investigation complete until the game decides it's complete. It's not an option to play a dispassionate investigator who's shown up to do the bare minimum, and none of the heroics.
I was ready to walk away once I knew where Ada Miller had gotten off to, but the game gave me no option to turn in my evidence. To be fair, that's not really the game's style. You're there to play through the adventure, not just to satisfy the prompt. I think it could have been a nice twist to let the players decide when the adventure is over, and then to offer a different ending depending on the degree of success. You do collect 2 or 3 evidence cards, so I really felt like I was earning my right to close the case, but in the end I had to play to the bitter end.
Admittedly, Mansions of Madness (like most board games) isn't known for infinitely branching storylines. You're meant to play through a scenario from a scripted beginning until a proscribed ending, often as a test of your ability to survive rather than to investigate.
In the same way that Escape from Innsmouth is frustratingly specific in its requirement for victory, Dark Reflections is about as linear as an adventure can possibly be. Whether you solve the mystery or just walk blissfully through the mansion, eventually a condition is met and the endgame is triggered. Once that happens, you are given a singular and specific goal, and only once you achieve that goal does the game end.
That's not necessarily a weakness. I played it twice, and in each game the mansion was laid out differently, once using tiles from the base set and then tiles from expansions. Important items were distributed differently throughout the mansion, so the adventure is basically a treasure hunt destined to go horribly wrong. It works well enough as a repeatable challenge. As with most scenarios, Dark Reflections feels uncannily different when you replay it with different characters and a different random assortment of starting items. The story's the same, but the layout is a little strange, and some of the outcomes differ. It's like re-playing a well-known dungeon in Dnd or Heroquest. The same, but different.
There are SPOILERS after this point! If you want to play this adventure and be surprised (and it is surprising, so it's worth doing), then STOP READING NOW.
From here on, I'm going to mention plot elements and mechanics assuming you've played Dark Reflections at least once. Do not read if you have not played it, and want to be surprised.
This adventure is one of the most linear Mansions of Madness adventures I've yet played. That's partly down to the simplicity of the story. The big plot reveal is in the title of the scenario, to say nothing of the cover image. There's basically one plot, and if you don't figure it out from the backwards "LEAVE" puzzle in the entry hall, then surely you've figured it out after you encounter the first covered mirror.
Aside from that, there's nobody to talk to in this adventure. No groundskeeper, no frightened maid, no hobo seeking shelter. Where other scenarios let red herrings or at least minor distractions surface from (admittedly modest) dialogue trees, Dark Reflections has one means for delivering narrative, and those elements never change.
This reveals some significant game design potential.
What if a Mansions of Madness adventure had different tracks of clues provided by Search Tokens? In this adventure, for example, maybe during one playthrough it was clear that Ada had been trapped in a mirror world and had turned evil. In the next playthrough, she'd just been trapped but hadn't dabbled in magick. In another, she manages to escape with all but her sanity, and has ended up in to the nearest asylum.
The conclusion you reach could determine the ending you get.
Some wandering NPCs could add some interesting and unexpected interactions. Maybe the mansion has acquired a squatter in Ada's absence. Or maybe the maid has returned from business in Arkham. Or the groundskeeper has come round to collect his wages. The local police could come calling to see why the investigators are in the mansion, or a distant associate of Great Aunt Seraphina's might come round looking for her.
These NPCs don't necessarily need to change the narrative, but each one has inherent potential for conflict or for clue delivery. It would be an easy randomised element to add to a scenario.
I enjoyed how few monsters there were in this scenario, partly because I don't find Mansions of Madness combat a little inelegant. However, a wandering monster is admittedly a way to add variety to gameplay. It would be surprising if, on 1 playthrough out of 3, a minor threat appeared on, say, a failed roll to interpret a grimoire. It doesn't have to happen all the time in every scenario (and to be honest I don't know how much randomness the app's game engine allows), but it's a good threat to add variety to an otherwise simple story.
In Dark Reflection, the game changes once all rooms of the mansion have been revealed. I did a test run to confirm it, and it definitely doesn't matter whether you've looked at any clue or uncovered any mirror. Once all tiles of the mansion have been placed, you are transported into the mirror world to fight the Hunting Horror.
What if, instead, the players could decide when the adventure ended? Place Circumstantial Evidence and Incriminating Evidence on the board, and let the players decide when to leave the mansion. Should they leave after collecting Circumstantial Evidence, then they get Ending 1. Should they leave with Incriminating Evidence, they get Ending 2. Should they leave having broken all mirrors and they've destroyed the Hunting Horror, then they get Ending 3.
We know from Rising Tide that different paths within the app can be dictated by player choices. Despite having exactly one ending, in which the players are trapped forever in a mirror world regardless of how they play the scenario, Dark Reflections demonstrates how easy it is to create interesting conditions for different kinds of victories. Circumstantial Evidence and Incriminating Evidence cards are powerful ways of measuring player focus. If players get into the attic with no evidence, then trapping them in a mirror world seems logical. If players get into the attic with evidence, however, then maybe providing them the opportunity to leave the mansion (as literally written on the wall of the entry hall) could be an interesting way to provide players with an ending where they get to actually survive on their home plane of existence.
The DLC format is, I think, an especially appropriate platform for scenarios that might seem surprisingly straightforward. If you're playing a DLC, then it's very likely you've played through all the base scenario, at the very least. I don't think I'd mind a DLC that ended after a thorough but overly cautious search of a mansion, with no combat and no interactions. Sometimes, that's a detective's job done. But on a second playthrough, I might discover that if you don't leave the mansion once you find Incriminating Evidence, and instead venture into the attic, then you get some combat and a different ending.
Player choices could also influence the "boss battle" at the end. The app can accept and parse input from players using the same buttons used for dialogue trees. Should the players report that Ada is dead, maybe the big boss is the Hunting Horror. Should they report that Ada is trapped in mirrors, their foe could be an echo of Great Aunt Seraphina. Should they report that Ada is trapped, and they have Incriminating Evidence, then their foe could be Ada as an evil sorceress. And so on.
The "boss battle" at the end of the scenario puzzles me. At 32 health, the Hunting Horror is only going to be destroyed with very good weapons and spells. Maybe I missed some spell opportunities in a grimoire, but in my first playthrough half my team died in the battle. In my second playthrough, I chose a team designed for combat and then happened to get lucky with really good weapons as starting items and as collectible items in the mansion, and the battle went a lot better.
I think adjusting the power level of the boss could make for a more satisfying game experience, although I also acknowledge that this is basically game master cheating. Some players (including me, on some days) would resent a monster being presented as a weaker opponent just because the game's random selection of weapons didn't add up to an easy battle.