One problem our group is running into with a few of these scenarios is that the game does not instill the sense of urgency that is in effect and it's causing us to lose. For example, the recent scenario with the parade and floats in Sanctum of Twilight. After getting to the mansion party we are basically told we need to find the girl and get out. However there are tons of things that need to be interacted with from pieces of paper, to buried figurines, to a ton of different people. We went though all of these and the last two had the items that were required for winning (the key and the rope) without much indication on where they were. One turn before we found the girl the app suddenly announced time was short. Then one turn later the game just ended without any real fanfare.

I think this is bad for a few reasons. The first was that the main section of the game was effectively pointless and ate up over an hour of playtime. Getting the rings didn't really affect much as busting in the back door didn't waste much time, especially when we had several monsters attack us from the front door. Second, if the game is going to have a hard cut off there needs to be a lot more indication of this. The first half made this very clear with the floats getting to the end of the street so we could plan out what we had time to do and what we didn't. Then in the second half we are at a dinner party that just suddenly goes crazy and hard fails without any real notices. Third it's incredibly anticlimactic. The game seemed to imply that people would get violent and we would have to force our way out once the magic tiara was stolen. However we didn't even get that the game just ended and everyone just went "huh..." and felt like we wasted two hours. Lastly if there is going to be a "time is running out! Better hurry up!" it should be much sooner than a turn before everything is over. That is totally useless unless you were going to win the next turn anyway and thus didn't need it.

There have been a few others like this although off the top of my head I can't really remember since we play sporadically. It's just an overall bad feeling when you find out you've been racing a clock without knowing it. The game encourages you to explore for narrative hooks and such but then you get punished because you only have a very set amount of actions before the game tells you the game has been lost. It often doesn't indicate how much you have outside of the most vague clues if even at all.

I would like if the scenarios could either shy away from these sorts of end states unless they make it very clear what the timer looks like (like the previous example of the floats moving through town). As it is these end up feeling like the sadistic GM who smugly tells their players that they lost because an hour ago they forgot to search something and don't have the item they need to kill the villain. I don't want to have to play this game assuming we could lose at any time because we have taken longer than the app wanted without saying and have to rush through and game the system as much as possible.

I somewhat agree, but I think it's a general agreement that the sense of urgency is always present. Warning or not, either you're doing things fast, or you're trying to get everything. The latter will never work. Sometimes you don't know what you need, which is a very bad situation to be in, but in those cases knowing that the game is going to end soon anyway isn't going to help with finding the items you need.

Clues could be telegraphed better in my opinion when they are available, but I can understand why FFG wouldn't want to use a clue system. If you know every time X person says "I think Stella had a strange book with her," it means that you have to solve a puzzle in the library to win, you can just memorize that and the result will be the same every time.

As far as the parade seeming like a waste of time, it's hard to say. I understand your point, but there's a lot going on in these scenarios under the hood that you don't get to see. Maybe by not getting the rings, you actually get less time to find the girl for instance. It's very hard to criticize this game specifically because the app holds so much information hostage from the players. I accept this at this point of playing it, but you essentially have to train yourself not to look too hard at the scenarios because who knows why "X" thing happened for sure?

In that scenario we got 4 out of 5 rings during the parade and ran out of time during the party with only a few wasted turns fighting monsters and talking to people. If even slightly being inefficient means an end state because of the hidden timer I think that's a real problem. The interact tokens, by their descriptions, aren't clear enough to know which ones are red herrings and which aren't without investigating. It's absolutely true if we had beelined to the closet, talked to the girl and gotten the key, gotten the rope in the same room, someone else goes to the diadem room and steals that, then everyone runs to the second floor and quickly gives everything to Marie we would have had enough time. However there is a lot of hidden information such as the map layout, where stuff is located, what happens when certain triggers are flipped, etc. I don't really want to feel like in a game where exploration and exposition are focused on, every game we have to worry that any turn could be the last without any warning. It encourages people to not want to interact with the game and try to rush through even if the sense of urgency isn't there.

The scenario with the multiple days of investigating the fish cult (I can't remember the name exactly) handled it better since there were clear indications that the day was getting longer and you would need to start wrapping things up instead of just saying "hey! you have one more turn" out of no where. It's also not just about the lack of notice; just ending the game when we could have instead been given the chance to fight out way our or escape with a mob following us would have been preferable to just saying "you lose" even if the likely hood of success was very low. People just felt that the end came out of nowhere and was absolute unsatisfying, especially after we seemingly did everything "right". We investigated the parade keeping the floats slow and got almost every ring to be found then in the party we found all the items we were supposed to while fighting off every monster and getting information from the guests. The game then punished us because we weren't going as fast as it felt we needed to without giving us the knowledge of that until it was too late to adjust.

Part of me is frustrated since after a few of these sorts of sessions people in my group are starting to lose interest in playing; losing out of nowhere is not really that fun even if the game is set in the Lovecraft "everyone is screwed" setting. I really, really like this game and these kinds of hidden fail states are hard when people only have a very limited amount of gaming time and this takes sometimes over two hours to play. Basically more "the party guests look agitated, you better start thinking about wrapping things up quickly" at the 50% mark instead of one turn before the end.

edit: I feel like I'm being overly negative since overall so I want to stress the game is really great and this is just something that ended the experience out of no where and faster than the players would have liked. If the game wasn't good and fun people in our group wouldn't care about it.

I do get where you're coming from for sure, and it's good feedback. It's just hard to say exactly how accurate the balancing is because of the hidden information.

I feel very similarly about the game, and, to be honest, it doesn't hit our table as often because of it. Not because the game is too hard, but rather just that it's often not satisfying all the time. I mostly play mansions when I don't want to deal with more complicated set-ups.