Between snow, work travel, and catching up on my MBA work, I haven’t had much time for traditional wargaming lately, so instead I’ve played… uh… a silly amount of Final Girl. Most recently, I got another feature film on the board: The Marrek Murders.

I’ll start by complimenting the art and graphic design–while I know some people don’t dig it, I think it’s really evocative. Half the reason I got this expansion is that the killer just looks cool to me.

This feature film is clearly inspired by the Saw movies, where a killer locks people in a warehouse and tortures them in traps to teach them lessons about valuing and fighting for life. Or something like that. I’ve never actually seen saw, I just know the basic premise involves sawing your leg off to escape a trap and survive. This makes for an interesting premise, because Final Girl normally revolves around a killer that is actively roaming the map and slaying people from the start of the game. The Tormentor, by contrast, doesn’t even start on the board. Instead, you and the other victims will fall into traps you have to solve to keep the overall Horror level under control.

In game terms, as Horror climbs you roll less dice and thus succeed less. Failed dice rolls often result in bad outcomes–which means you really want to keep Horror under control. As victims fall into traps, you find yourself scrambling to run to them and save them, which is accomplished by sacrificing actions per the requirements on the card. I found that until the killer showed up, I had to manage saving people against trying to find weaponry for the inevitable final conflict, while also dealing with the traps I fall into. All of this to keep Horror under control and prevent the killer from growing stronger by killing people, which raises Bloodlust, which in turn makes the killer stronger when she appears.

This led to a match where I scrambled to free myself from a trap, ran across the map to try and save two victims from their traps, only to then fall into a second trap myself. By the time I bailed out, I had lost one of them and was closing in on the killer’s arrival–I had to choose between the victim or having a magnum in hand for the killer.

I would like to think I sent flowers to their family.

This tension works quite well, with the horror skyrocketing if you’re not cautious, leading to a stronger killer when they arrive. It’s a lot to balance and creates for a different game flow from the more “Normal” feature films. I really dig it. Then the killer arrives… and it falls apart. The killer has seven health, which is actually quite low. In the game with the magnum, I shot her twice at a distance and dropped her. In my other match, I managed to beat her with no special weaponry, but a few traps to weaken her before our engagement. That is to say: it was a bit easy.

The map itself is also one I like visually and conceptually, but its special features don’t feel like much. You can walk around on the large shelving, and jump shelf to shelf as a way of traveling around faster. I never found this necessary and just paid the extra movement to move around the shelving.

And yet, overall, I really like this expansion. I love the different pace and the creativity behind a boss that doesn’t beat you through sheer force but by weakening you through mounting horror. On balance, I think this is a killer I’ll be revisiting more frequently than others just for its sheer variety and differing approach.

If you’ve bought into the system, I’m sure you could do worse than this map–it does a great job of working the game’s mechanics from a different angle and is creative enough to warrant the play. Now, onto the next one: A Rotten Harvest.