I’m Andrew, the founder of Haiku Games. We recently released Adventure Escape Mysteries. In this game, you can play TWO separate adventures. Solve a murder mystery in Trapmaker and cast magical spells in Cursed Crown! 

Most people really enjoy the game, and I want to thank everyone who's playing it!
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​But we've also received a few emails about the key system that we added. For example, here's one which calls us "money grubbing, bottom feeding developers" :(.

So I wanted to talk about the key system. But before we get there, I want to just point out that we’ve added a lot to Adventure Escape Mysteries. We have two new games you can play for free, and we plan to launch more. We have user accounts so it’s possible for you to play on multiple devices. And we even give more stars in the tutorial, whereas in the past we gave five (or even zero!) stars. There are a lot of great changes “under the hood” as well.
 
Now onto the key system. It’s true that you’ll have to wait if you play more than two chapters at a time. We looked at the data from our previous games, and it takes around 1.5 hours for each player to complete each chapter. That means if you play our game for 3 hours in a day, you’ll need more keys. I think that’s a lot of gameplay to provide players. You can wait to get the keys, but if you really want to play more right away, you can pay for some keys. Compared to a movie, which in the USA costs around $10-15 for 2 hours of entertainment, I think we provide more than a fair deal.
 
Why did we add it? Well there are two main reasons. First of all, we talked to some of our friends with their own game companies. They told us when they took keys away from their game, players actually played their game less. It seems that players burned out on their game. By adding keys, we hope we can help people space out Adventure Escape and enjoy all our stories.
 
Second, people play our game in many ways, and we have a segment of players who never want to reveal a hint or skip a puzzle. But they really love Adventure Escape and some have even tried to donate money to us. We hope these players will purchase some keys and support our company that way.
 
We’re an indie company and we don’t have any funding from investors. We work with a lot of great people all around the world to make Adventure Escape. We have game designers who create the stories and puzzles, artists who draw all the beautiful art, developers who program the gameplay and fix bugs, etc. And of course, all of these people should be paid for their work. Ultimately our goal is to continue making great games for the long run, so adding new features – some free and some paid – is an important part of how we can achieve that. 

Happy holidays!