I'm playing through all the Mansions of Madness scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. Shattered Bonds is the third adventure listed in the app, and it's rated 5 stars (the highest rating in the game) for difficulty. This review contains spoilers.
I've already said in previous reviews that I believe Mansions of Madness does a poor job of maintaining consistent player experience. The first scenario in the app is Cycles of Eternity and its difficulty rating is lower than what it deserves. It also has complex mechanics many of which should have been reserved for scenarios that would come later in a player's journey. By the time you get around to playing Shattered Bonds, however, you're accustomed to the kinds of challenges and mechanics the game has at its diposal. This is a 5-star difficulty scenario, and it feels like one, but most importantly it feels "right". This is difficult because it was designed that way. Going in, you expect a little unfairness to the benefit of evil. You expect to be assaulted by forces beyond your control, and you are.
You've been called to the Bechman estate by a frantic Grace Bechman. On the way there, your car breaks down so you have to walk the rest of the way. When you arrive, Grace is crestfallen to learn that you haven't brought a car, because apparently that was her primary reason for calling you in the first place. She wanted you to take her and what remains of her family away from the estate. Probably she should have mentioned that on the phone, because then you wouldn't have brough 3 friends to crowd up the car, and when your car broke down maybe you'd have tried to get it repaired before showing up.
Now that you're there though, Grace invites you in because, although you arrived safely, it's apparently dangerous outdoors. Once in the Bechman mansion, Grace tells you there's a monster preying upon her family. Probably she should have mentioned that on the phone, because then you likely would have brought, like, a weapon or something (or maybe you got lucky during setup and did draw a weapon, but I didn't).
Your job is to find and kill the monster. Of course, its not as simple as it first seems. The monster seems to be preying upon Grace's daughter Mildred most of all, and it doesn't seem to manifest unless attracted by a loud noise. It also seems that the Bechman family has a strange fascination with the occult, and so scattered throughout the mansion are clues and hints about what form the monster might take. And if you search hard enough, maybe you'll find some things that could help defeat your unseen enemy.
The main tension in this scenario is your desire to find the components required for a ritual to defeat the monster, and also to find the monster, while also constantly being assailed by supernatural events that impose Horror cards on you. A lot of the Horror penalties are made possible by the mansion itself, or by the unseen monster, described initially as just a shadowy darkness that moves from room to room and either horrifies investigators and, in some cases, kills members of the Bechman family and staff. Not counting the major boss battle at the end, I encounterd only 3 monsters during exploration, and I either dispatched or contained most of those with minimal damage.
The real threat is Horror, which frequently gets placed on an investigator without a Horror check or any roll to negate. Something happens, and you get 2 Horror. It adds up fast, and I settled on a strategy that kept my investigators far apart from one another, with each one moving around a lot.
I do admit to cheesing a Haunting Horror that crawled in through a window. I barricaded it into the ballroom, and positioned an investigator on the other side of the barricade. Rules as written, the Haunting Horror had to attempt to move toward that investigator because he was the closest investigator. This contained the monster for several rounds while I had all my other investigators move freely around the mansion. I don't think the Haunting Horror ever did get through the barricade, and he only got dispatched once I was ready to take him on.
The boss battle at the end is definitely formidable. I won't spoil what form it takes, but it's a tough enemy that intimidate me so much that I just sort of forgot to play for 2 days. When I finally decided I was delaying the inevitable, I went back to the game, played super tactically and scored a win for 3 of my 4 investigators. All of them had gone insane, but they had spells, a heavy weapon, and even some dynamite (which I sadly didn't get the opportunity to use because I decided that Agatha wasn't quite insane enough to toss dynamite into a space containing the monster AND Wendy Adams). It was a very satisfying battle, and the only reason Father Mateo didn't win was because he was Dazed and Stunned and couldn't pick up some evidence his insanity demanded he have in his deck before the end of the game.
This is classic Mansions of Madness. Exploration, modest investigation through some NPC conversations, a few combat encounters along the way, and a big battle at the end. Come to think of it, this is a classic D&D dungeon crawl.
Its pace is even, so to me it felt a lot less difficult than Escape from Innsmouth. Sure, there's a big boss at the end, but you get ample warning about it and you kind of know what you're in for.
Regardless of how the scenario happens to manifest, it's a fun one. I'll definitely be playing it a few more times, because there are rooms I never got to and family members (or staff, not sure) I failed to encounter before they got removed from the game by the monster.