by Michael Eckenfels, 29 September 2025
If you’ve ever thought that nothing says “family bonding” quite like inheriting a haunted castle full of melodramatic relatives, questionable fashion choices, and the vague smell of mothballs and despair, well, Unhappy Birthday at Castle Slogar is the party you didn’t know you were attending. Imagine a birthday bash where the cake is stale, the gifts are cursed, and the only balloons are filled with existential dread. It’s less a celebration and more a competition to see who can suffer the most fabulously.
Unhappy Birthday at Castle Slogar is less a book and more a macabre invitation to an ill-fated fête, drenched in shadows and dripping with the sort of dark melodrama that would make even the most stoic raven clutch its pearls. Within these pages, you are not merely a reader – you are a conspirator in the Slogar family’s latest round of gloom-soaked gatherings. Each character arrives cloaked in eccentricity and sorrow, their backstories stitched together with equal parts tragedy and taxidermy. Choices unfold like candlelit corridors: will you stumble into ruin, or will you ensure your rivals meet with poetic misfortune first? It is part storytelling, part game, and entirely devoted to ensuring that no birthday candle burns without a gust of ill wind to snuff it out.
You see, as the player of this book game – a solo player, by the way – you have been summoned (not ‘invited,’ but SUMMONED) to Castle Slogar to celebrate the birthday of Melissa, who is turning 9. The book’s description adds “again” to the statement, as if you’ve gone to her birthday parties before. Guests are there already, scattered throughout the castle, and on top of that, Lord Slogar – presumed master of this macabre edifice – is missing. It is your job in this story to ‘lend a hand’ to save Melissa’s party and rescue Lord Slogar.
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The means to do this is not obvious, but if it were, it wouldn’t be any fun! You are given a map of the castle, laid out into various rooms, and instructed to start on a certain set of pages. From there, you enter the first room – the Foyer, which I feel I can share without sharing any startling secrets as, you know, it’s the starting room and all – and you are presented with a narrative around your presence at this party. You are then presented with a puzzle to solve.
To solve this puzzle, you’re given instructions of course, and without spoiling anything, they come in different varieties. The solution is usually an action or word or something that indicates what you need to do in order to proceed to another room. To facilitate this, there is a website that Atlas Games host – which I won’t share here, because it is actually in the book itself and not on the back cover, where you go to enter the puzzle answer. Each puzzle provides three Hints that can help you figure it out, and even provides a solution as well. Like the old Sierra On-Line game hint books, you can uncover each hint to get a little more insight, starting with Hint 1. If you’re not getting it, continue with the other hints until it clicks. Or just click ‘Solution’ to see the full answer, but this defeats the whole purpose of figuring out the puzzles. Admittedly, I clicked ‘Solution’ a couple of times as I wasn’t getting the answer fully, and felt dirty doing it. Solving it yourself releases much more dopamine in the right spots.
The entire pathway through the book works pretty well. One would think this sounds like a kid’s book, but honestly, I think it works well for anyone that likes to solve puzzles. It reminds me very much of the old Games Magazine, which provided different puzzles to readers to solve using pencil and/or pen. My dad was a huge fan of this magazine, though it never did much for me (it reminded me too much of math problems in word format). Nevertheless, perhaps my tastes have changed to a point where I actually did enjoy proceeding through this adventure.
While some rooms look like they have access to multiple rooms, the solutions tend to only unlock a certain path through the castle. You can, though, go back to rooms you’ve already visited if you want to.
As you solve each puzzle, you progress through the castle, getting closer to resolving the story. Each new room unlocks a new, unique puzzle to solve. Delightedly, I found some of them related to literature, but there was a wide variety of these in different themes and situations. So, it was not the same thing over and over but in different presentations, but rather, new and unique ones each time.
The book is a lot of fun to go through, something I wasn’t expecting; the appeal to me in the first place was that it is a solo puzzle book with a story tying various solutions along as a narrative. The puzzles aren’t tied together thematically, though. The real tie-in is the rooms in the castle, and you progressing through each one. The puzzles are themed to the rooms you visit (and I may have already given away too many spoilers), which is a nice touch.
Each room has unique puzzles, and equally unique artwork to go along with it. The artist, J. Scott Reeves, has created some interesting work here that ties in very well with author Mark Larson’s odd take on reality within the castle itself. No, this is not a horror game, at least not insofar as say something like Beetlejuice is horror. The characters are inimitable and delightful.
As of this review, the Digital version (PDF) of this book is $4.95, while the physical copy is $17.95. I received a physical copy of the book for this review and enjoyed the experience. The reader will need to mark up the pages using a pen or pencil (I recommend pencil so you can play it again later after forgetting everything, which I can do in a few weeks’ time), but otherwise, nothing else is required other than an appreciation for quirky stories that are as fun to go through as the puzzles are to solve.
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