Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

I've adored KTaNE since I first played it. It's tense, a great test of communication skills, and extremely well put together, with a simple learning curve spread out with mild tests of your ability littered among the base game's playthrough.

You're tasked with defusing a bomb through a series of increasingly complicated 'modules' - sections of the bomb that require a separate player (who doesn't need to own the game), deemed the 'expert', to communicate with the main player, the 'defuser', in order to defuse. It starts simple - colours of wires, symbol shapes, labels on buttons - but quickly escalates to literal Morse Code, an invisible maze that only the defuser can see the walls to, and needy modules that re-activate every minute or so, demanding a diversion from whatever you're currently doing.

As the game progresses, you get more familiar with identifying modules on sight, knowing what information you'll need to convey to your expert(s), and reducing miscommunications between the two of you, before the game suddenly throws in an extra challenge. Complete this bomb in about half the time you're used to! Here's a bomb with five of the same module! On this bomb, you can no longer make two mistakes before the bomb explodes! The developers weave all of these variations seamlessly into the campaign, and it's difficult to understand how good you're getting at defusing bombs until you go back to the first one and solve it before the lights turn on.

The final set of bombs you're given as a player are particularly exotic, a little beyond what developers thought their playerbase would be able to handle: the elation me and my team of experts felt upon completing the entire game after several days of play was utterly immense precisely because of how difficult it felt.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that the community considers the 'vanilla' modules to be, at most, difficulty 2. Of 80.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes thrives off of community content. There's only 14 modules in the base game; as of writing this review, there are 1687 modules on the community workshop - all of them to an astounding level of quality equal to or above those in the base game. I can't even comprehend some of the toughest modules, like Cruel Synesthesia (correctly identifying the volumes of three simultaneous notes, 16 times) or The Ultracube (a 5 dimensional cube), to say nothing of a module like Identifrac (where you must correctly identify a 3d fractal); but it's worth noting that difficulty is not the main appeal of KTaNE's community content.

The number of modules that are just plain fun are everywhere - tributes to NSMB in the form of Luigi Poker, a Tetris needy module, Boss Modules that you need to check after every solve (and that can only be solved at the very end), and so many more. Modders have even created custom defusal rooms; an assembly line, an infinite room of mirrors, and the office from FNaF, to name a few.

It's an incredibly community-ran game, and it's lucky enough to have one of the most creative and interesting communities out there keeping it alive six years after release. Absolutely worth every penny.

best 2 player party game
so entertaining a lot of potential for content