I played the What Lies Within DLC for Mansions of Madness, and this is my review of it. My short spoiler-free summary is that Dearly Departed is an intriguing investigative adventure with a highly engaging story. This review contains no spoilers beyond the prologue.
One nice thing about What Lies Within is that it's a DLC for the Mansions of Madness app, not an expansion set. That means you can buy it on Steam and play it with just the base Mansions of Madness set. Should you own expansions, What Lies Within can make use of assets from those sets, but you don't need anything more than just the core box.
There's been a murder. A man has been killed in his home (which is a mansion, of course), and strangely the beat cop who discovered it has returned to the police station with a refusal to investigate until morning. So the police chief calls you in.
This is an intriguing start already. Police officers in fiction don't usually refuse to investigate an obvious murder, so this adventure had my game group's attention by the end of its brief prologue. When you arrive at the mansion, there's a key under the mat but the front door is already ajar. In the entry hall, you see the outline of where the police had discovered the dead body, and you notice that the outline clearly shows that the victim was missing the lower half of an arm.
The story of what transpired not just that evening, but over the victim's entire life, unfolds gradually as you move through the mansion. It's sort of a master class in storytelling through the medium of a board game. Obviously the game has no control over what you investigate, or in what order, but the victim's history and the plot of the adventure reveals itself to you as you meander through the sparse remains of a wealthy and dysfunctional family.
Although we'd intended to play the scenario over the course of 2 days, my game group couldn't stop playing out of consternation. The adventure provides answers to questions in short order, but whenever one question is answered, another 2 present themselves.
Obviously you know it's a game in the Lovecraft universe, so you assume that something's going to get, or already has been, summoned to destroy all humankind. The big reveal at the end (assuming there is one, no spoilers) is rarely the goal of a Mansions of Madness game. Neither, usually, is the stated mystery. We don't really care who (or what?) killed the victim, that's just the excuse we need to get to the end sequence where we interrupt the ritual or fight the monster or whatever. It's always about the path you take to get to the big reveal, and this adventure's journey is suitably addictive.
One puzzling aspect of the adventure is that the authors never bother giving the victim a name. It's surprisingly annoying. Every time the victim is mentioned, he's referred to as "the deceased" or "the man with the lower half of an arm missing". It would have been a lot simpler to read (and probably even more immersive) with a name, even if it was just John Doe.
It has no bearing on the mechanics of the adventure, so it's a minor complaint.
There are some pretty difficult puzzles in this adventure. If you've played a few Mansions of Madness scenarios, then you already know what minigames the app has in it, so it's no surprise. But personally I find the rune scramble puzzles to be the most difficult, and there are 2 of those in this adventure, plus 2 lockpick puzzles.
My gaming group got past 3 out of 4 of them, and of course there are contingencies for failure when it matters. You don't have to succeed at the puzzles.
For the most part, this is a highly restrained Mansions of Madness adventure. It doesn't throw monsters at you just for the sake of combat. There are some token fights during the main adventure, but I never got the sense that the game designers wanted there to be a monster harrying you the whole time. My gaming group dispatched the wandering monsters quickly, and found the mythos events surprisingly forgiving.
Mostly, this adventure is about uncovering pieces of a horrific and, if you really think about it, emotional story. It's definitely one of those "maybe the real monster is humanity" tales, which personally I find the most disturbing, but it's well within the usual comfortable horror tropes. It's not presented in a very sensationalist way, so I found it easy to accept the horrors of what had happened with the same level of detachment as I accept any murder mystery.
Knowing nothing about the adventure in advance, my gaming group happened to choose what I think ended up being a dream team for What Lies Within.
What Lies Within isn't a procedural mystery, but it's definitely a satisfying investigation. There's a valid argument that the scenario is "on rails". It's mechanically impossible for you to skip over everything and just go straight to the final encounter. You have to investigate to find some specific things that trigger the final encounter.
It may not be the most re-playable scenario of the bunch (or it may be, depending on your tolerance for re-playing stories you already know), but it's a fun story to experience. I'm definitely going to re-play it, at least once, with a new batch of investigators.
If you like story-driven Mansions of Madness, then this is an adventure you ought to try.