Review – The Treasure Trove of Pirate Cove by Solve Our Shirts (CU Adventures)
Website Link – https://www.solveourshirts.com
Price – $45-50
Disclaimer: we purchased the t-shirt (game) with our own money, this review is not sponsored. All thoughts are our own.
A little background:
This is our second experience with Solve Our Shirts! We played their first game, Escape the Maze of the Minotaur, in 2021 for Chaos’ Birthday. We purchased 5 couple packs (10 shirts), divided our friends into teams of two, and made it a race to see who could finish solving their shirts first. Chaos and Confetti were ecstatic to win and beat the other four teams, especially since they had such strong competition! We and our friends were very happy with our experiences and the shirts made a nice party favor. Chaos still wears his with some regularity. The first Solve Our Shirt was such an enjoyable experience that Confetti didn’t hesitate to purchase The Treasure Trove of Pirate Cove for Chaos for Christmas.
The Product:
Solve Our Shirts produces shirts that they market as 60-90 minute escape rooms in a shirt. The actual shirts have themed front and back images which are part of the larger puzzles. The details of the shirts’ designs are filled with hidden clues and details to help players along their quest. The shirts also come with a few other physical components to be used to solve puzzles. Players will need internet access to get on the company’s website. There they will be able to login to their specific shirt’s portal in order to advance the story, gain more information, and input answers.
This game is pirate themed and will have players embarking on an adventure to discover treasure. It will take wit, bravery, style, and more to make it to the end successfully. A talking parrot, a peg leg, and an eye patch might help too, but aren’t required.
It’s important to note, the shirt is not meant to be destroyed during the course of the game. When you finish, you should have a new shirt to add to your wardrobe and maybe a few other goodies too.
Our thoughts:
As our second outing with a Solve Our Shirts product, we went in with high hopes. Immediately after opening the packaging we were already greeted with a fun looking shirt and some physical components which we looked forward to putting to use.
While we had fun solving the previous shirt while actually wearing it, we opted to work on this one without donning it first. With only one copy of the shirt this time, it made it a lot easier to work together as a team.
A t-shirt is an interesting medium to use for a puzzle challenge and thankfully Solve Our Shirt knows how to incorporate the actual shirt into its puzzles seamlessly. You’ll definitely need their website and physical components to advance, but every puzzle does a good job of pointing back to the shirt and making sure that it is the main star of the show. Maze of the Minotaur might have done a slightly better job of imbedding more clues into its design, but Treasure Trove of Pirate Cove is no slouch and the shirt is still jam packed with details to discover.
Figuring out what the details mean and how they interact with other pieces of the game is where a lot of the fun comes from. Thankfully, despite once again working with a t-shirt, Solve Our Shirt doesn’t simply repeat its old tricks and instead finds new ways to make the playing experience memorable and to use the space they’ve given themselves.
As for the actual puzzles, they are very well put together and a blast to crack. We won’t go into too much detail because we don’t want to spoil anything, but every puzzle felt logical and solvable. Trial and error was our friend for a few puzzles, but we never hit any true frustration points. Instead, we hit points of glee as clues and concepts clicked into place for us. The one time we did use the game’s hint system, it began by pointing us back to simple skills first. It basically asked: did you read carefully? Shamefully, our answer was no. As soon as we reread the clue we had, everything came together nicely and we need no further hints.
Thanks to the web-based interface, the puzzles follow a fun narrative, which leads to a satisfying conclusion. While it doesn’t have much of an impact on the actual story, we appreciated that players are given some flexibility on the order in which they’ll take on the different puzzles. This helps the game feel a little less linear, even if all roads eventually lead to Rome.
For anyone who enjoyed the Maze of the Minotaur, we strongly recommend The Treasure Trove of Pirate Cove. To those who have yet to give Solve Our Shirts a chance, we highly recommend both experiences. You can’t go wrong with getting either one, or even both.
Chaos looks forward to getting to wear another shirt that sneakily covers him in puzzle clues.
Chaos & Confetti 