Designed by: Uncredited
Bringing the Escape Room idea into your home, Escape Room: The Game mimics – loosely – the experience of having to solve a bunch of puzzles in order to free yourself before time runs out. The first puzzle (there are four) Prison Break sticks to this idea very closely, but although the narratives then diverge, all four ‘escapes’ give you just an hour – no breaks, no pauses, go for a wee before you start – in which to figure everything out. It would be spoiling things to go into any detail here, but basically the game gives you a smorgasboard of information, some of which is helpful, and you need to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Once you think you’ve done that, the next job is to enter keys into the games’ chrono-decoder, and hope it rewards you with a joyous jingle to show this part of the puzzle has been successfully solved. If you get it wrong, you’ll get a discordant buzz and lose a minute of precious time!
There are a number of keys, each representing a number, letter or shape, and the decoder itself plays a physical part in the play here, with either end of it featuring a cryptological aspect that features in each mystery. There are also hints to help you – and these are triggered at certain points in the countdown. Finish the final puzzle before the hour is up, and you win! Fail – and you don’t.
None
None
Low on rules, high on puzzling out on what to do
There are only four adventures, after which the game is played out, but you are of course free to pass it on to like-minded family/friends.
3-5
Players
12+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Few pictures here because pictures would give information, and that is the game's only currency - unless you count time, which is equally precious. Although we managed the first adventure inside an hour, we needed the hints to do so because the genuine clues are so obfuscated by red herrings and irrelevant information. How much you enjoy Escape Room really depends on how you feel about that - Prison Break for instance is relatively straightforward but one particular puzzle gave us the letters for a code but not the order, so 'solving' it felt rather scattergun. It's a very particular type of fun; potentially brilliant for the right crowd, a potential source of exasperation for the wrong one. The decoder is a fun aspect, something that gives Escape Room a tense against-the-clock edge over similar games like EXIT .