I’ve been on a kick within a kick.
Good: The early Cube Escape/Rusty Lake games, Rusty Lake: Roots, Escape from Mystwood Mansion
Meh: Escape Simulator, The Inheritance of Crimson Manor, Escape First Alchemist
Bad: Escape Academy, Havsala
Rusty Lake/Cube Escape
(Rusty Lake, 2015-2016)
So at time of writing I’ve played up to but not including Roots, the game that caused the series to blow up. That means the first 9 games. That sounds like a lot, but the series started as small flash games so they went by pretty fast; Hotel was probably the most involved one, and it was still just 2.5 hours to 100% (it was also the one that wasn’t just a web game at first release).
I honestly really have loved these, despite the fact that on paper it doesn’t necessary seem like something I would like –eldritch horror elements, a retconned story that clearly started as just vibes, few answers to what’s going on, weird use of suicide as a metaphor, sometimes gross, etc. But the game does these things so well that it transcends the problems I usually have with them — I actually really liked seeing how they clearly were just going for atmosphere in the first couple of Cube Escape games and then later on were like, okay, how do we explain this and make it coherent? The result is some really creative, unique, and interesting lore that was clearly done deliberately and thoughtfully when it was retconned in, and it works.
The other thing that works are the soft horror elements — the game really understands why and when less is more; the anticipation of horror is worse than the thing itself, the monster you see briefly outside the window is scarier than the thing you see clearly in front of you. The result is that the game really, really earns its jumpscares by being judicious with them. By using things like the shadows and disembodied hands as motifs it also makes them feel purposeful and meaningful within the universe; I think one of the problems these types of games can have is that the horror stuff starts to feel too directed at the player and becomes a suspension of disbelief problem, but here when you do stumble across it you’re like ‘oh, yeah, ok, that is what would be here.’ I don’t know, it just worked for me. The whole mood and tone worked for me in a way it usually wouldn’t.
The other thing is this game has a really wonderful conservation of detail and gameplay that I really appreciated. Nothing is frivolous or puseposeless and it really enhances the puzzle-solving. The oldest games can definitely have an issue with obscure solutions, but those get significantly better over time (I seem to also remember seeing one of the devs say this is something they know they were iffy on early on but have consciously improved, and it shows). The puzzles are satisfying because nothing is extraneous; no amount of detail-oriented gameplay is too much, but at the same time there’s no excess of detail to waste your time. Solid.
I liked these enough I also played their tabletop version! Mr. Act and I had a lot of fun with it, it was a good time. The design ethos translated really well to pen-and-paper.
These games won’t be for everyone, but as far as weird point-and-click logic puzzles go, I really liked them. I’m looking forward to Roots, the dev’s first commercial release, when I have time for it.
Escape Academy
(Coin Crew Games, 2022)
This game answered a question I didn’t know I had, which was, “What kind of clusterfuck would result if you designed a game the same way you’d design a physical space?” It was interesting for all the wrong reasons.
The main problem with this game is it’s designed like a physical escape room. Trying to explain what that means is tricky. A list:
1. A timer counting down constantly, a thing which… like, in physical escape rooms, you can’t have a party there for 8 hours. Just like, as a business. But also, as physical humans in a group, running around a physical space frantically for an hour is fun. When you remove the parts where you’re with your friends and touching physical items and the rooms are small and you have something to do later so you can’t stay all day, the timer is just annoying. The way people engage with time in media versus real life is just different — people might put a game down for a while and come back to it, or want to take their time to think through logic puzzles, or try a bunch of weird solutions that are probably wrong before doing what they’re supposed to do, or any number of things that make an artificial time limit just incredibly annoying. If you’re like me, it also creates a weird amount of anxiety, which again, desireable in a physical scenario to get the adrenaline pumping, really unpleasant in a digital one.
2. So many useless menus and interfaces. Like, I can’t believe I have to spell this out, but in real life you can look at a bunch of screens all at once, or just by slightly moving your head around. In a game, having to constant select the screen I want to see, then zoom in, then zoom in again on a clue — there were so many insane layers of interaction you constantly had to navigate in and out of. It was so, so annoying.
3. Bad demarcation of interactables and important items. The was so much junk cluttering every scenario, and there was no way to know if any of it mattered or would ever matter, because sometimes you’d get a puzzle and sometimes you’d get flavour text and sometimes something that had seeemed like flavour text would later turn out to be interactable and sometimes it wouldn’t… god it was awful. Is something in that bin or is that a decorative bin? Who knows! You can’t reach it anyway because the rooms are designed like physical spaces, so you will never find out. There just shouldn’t have been flavour text during the actual levels, not least because ACCIDENTALLY CLICKING IT WHILE THE CLOCK WAS RUNNING WAS A HORRIBLE FEELING. I cannot explain how infuriating this was.
4. No awareness of what the game was or wasn’t teaching the player to do. This was a huge problem. Again, escape rooms in like, life, are designed to be one-offs — this isn’t something you have to think about when designing them. But the language of game design is also a form of back-and-forth communication with the player, and if you’re not paying attention to what you’re saying to them, you run into real problems. To give you an example of what I mean, at once point in like the third level you see a sequence, “🦴-b dddddd” that is the password to a computer. Up until that point, all letter sequences like this had been number strings and math problems. I spent so. long. scraping that stupid-ass room trying to find some indication of what number ‘🦴, b, and d’ were equal to while the goddamn clock was ticking. It was one of the most frustrating and infuriating experiences I’ve ever had in a video game. I finally opened the hint screen, and the first hint was “What happens if you remove the letter b from the word ‘bone’?” and my brain immediately went ‘Jesus fuck, it’s 160.” I subsequently went on the forums to see that many, many other people were furious about this puzzle, and the dev said it was the biggest complaint by far, but they didn’t understand why WHICH IS INSANE ON ITS OWN, but the reason why is actually really simple. The game had strongly indicated through prior levels that we should think in terms of equations and single-substitution alphanumeric codes, but there was literally no other rebus, or any indication to the player that they might expect a rebus. The problem is the game had trained the player incorrectly, because it wasn’t thinking about its own design holistically. It doesn’t shock me that no one had been able to articulate this to the dev, but it is astounding to me the dev has thought so little about the fundamentals of game design that they haven’t been able to figure this out on their own. But hey, you see this kind of thing in physical escape rooms all the time, right???
These were just the worst instances, but the problem was persistent, and once I figured out why the issues were there, they just kind of kept cropping up.
The other issue with the game, and the reason I ultimately DNFed it (as curious as I was about the terrible choices it would make), was that it made me wildly motion sick. It had something to do with the camera’s lateral movement — it happened most when I would move to one side but face a different direction when I was moving. And it was bad and sudden — at one point I was mostly fine and then literally threw the Steam Switch down and sat up because I genuinely thought I might puke and I was ready to run to the bathroom. I saw multiple people commenting about severe motion sickness in the Steam forums, so it wasn’t just me (although admittedly I’m really sensitive); fiddling with the settings did nothing to help, I would still get hit with these sudden waves of nausea during lateral movement. Like I said, I’m sensitive, but I’ve never had anything like this happen before, where it would go from like 2 to 100 instantly, multiple times across multiple playthroughs. I’m not really sure what to attribute this to other than a lack of sufficient playtesting.
The other problem the game had was a really weird tone problem. It couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be serious or not, and IMO not leaning into how bizarre its premise is was a huge missed opportunity. I mean, the protagonist literally gets kidnapped and everyone acts like this is normal? I genuinely don’t understand why this wasn’t written like, say, Kraken Academy or The Procession to Cavalry. Taking cues from a Japanese absurdist ethos like Katamari would also have worked. This was begging to be some kind of funny, surrealistic experience but seemed afraid of the wackiness of its own premise, wanting instead to be gritty realism. This was a bad choice, and took away something that could have made the game really stand out. I never knew what I was expected to be feeling from scene to scene, or whether something was meant to be like… funny, in a cheesy way? or I was supposed to be taking it seriously. The vibes were off, as the kids say.
Escape Simulator
(Pine Studio, 2021)
As far as I’m aware this is the game that kickstarted the current 3D escape room trend. It’s very competently made, but I think I just fundamentally don’t find this type of game interesting. It ultimately falls into that “I don’t find the idea of clicking things to be inherently entertaining” space.
One of the constraints about escape games that I find really interesting is that if you’re aiming for any kind of narrative, you have to build an environment that is at least superficially naturalistic. If you fall into that old Hanna-Barbera thing where the item that’s about to move is clearly drawn differently from the background, you undermine your own game. This is a needle the Rusty Lake games thread really well, incidentally.
One of the problems with these games where the settings are escape rooms first is that none of the objects are naturalistic, so it’s immediately obvious what you’re going to be interacting with. The exact way to interact with it may be tricky or veiled, but the tiny room with a giant black hole in the wall isn’t hiding its cards. And to me, this hyperartificialty, where no room would ever actually exist this way, kind of ruins the experience. In a real escape room you have the excitement of trying to solve something as a group, after a few drinks, against a timer, etc — and more importantly, you’re interacting with the physical objects, turning handles, lining up locks, looking under vases; there are physical realities that make the artificiality of the setup irrelevant. But in a game, dropping me into a small space that is clearly set up as a puzzle to solve removes the thing that a game can bring to the table, while also not having the things a physical space brings to the table.
And in a 3D space, there’s just too much room for excess. Requiring me to do the same puzzle a half dozen times to move on is certainly a unique thing you get in a digital escape room that you can’t in a physical, but it’s also not something I’ve ever wanted out of a puzzle game. It’s adding stuff for the sake of their being more stuff. I again found myself thinking the genre is better for its constraints, in this case of a 2D ‘room’ environment.
The end result is that this is a game of click sequences, and, well, that doesn’t really do anything for me. The game’s main way of trying to compensate is by hiding teeny-tiny little stickers you have to find in each level, and holy shit does this not help the feeling of Sisyphean pointlessness I already was finding inherent to the basic premise. It might as well have us memorize long strings of numbers to unlock the next door rpgmaker style; tiny hidden things is the 3D puzzle version of that.
I can recognize that a) one of the big selling points of this game is its coop features and room-building, which I respect as a thing people would really enjoy, and b) that people who are looking for games as low-stakes entertainment and not narrative probably do just want to figure out click sequences, and if you fall into those categories the production values here are really high and I get why it would be appealing.
But the kind of things I personally look for in a game just aren’t really here, and I’ll likely stay away from 3D room games going forward.
Rusty Lake: Roots
(Rusty Lake, 2016)
Roots was the game that blew up and made the series big, and Steam has been recommending it to me for basically a decade now. Fittingly, this was also the studio’s first full-length, paid release. Coming off the earlier games that made me both excited and nervous that I wouldn’t like it.
But I loved it. I was worried at first since the first few vingettes were crazy simple and I was like, “Oh no, did saying they’d shored up their puzzle design actually just mean making everything stupid basic?” but luckily this was just the tutorial section and I really liked the puzzle design overall.
I just really loved it! I love how weird it is, how careful, how the pistol on the mantle is always fired. I love how judicious it is with its weirdness, all the ah-ha moments, the way the story is just coherent enough to be compelling without losing that feeling of never quite knowing what’s going on. I just really like these games and the way they’re put together, and I’m glad to see that the team could so successfully move their formula into a longer-form piece.
This is a crappy review, but sorry! I just like these, I don’t have anything constructive to say about them. I probably won’t do writeups about the following games in the series and will just soak them in.
Escape from Mystwood Mansion
(Lost Sock Studio, 2023)
Just as I was ready to give up on 3D escapers, I played this! I really, really enjoyed this one. It made good on all my earlier complaints: the mansion is thoughtfully organized as much like an actual living space as possible, a constraint that hugely improves the experience, and there’s just enough of a plot to give you intrinsic motivation. The puzzles are insanely well-designed and, wonderfully, they are even designed such that achievement and ending cleanup is easy and smooth, because once you know solutions you can bypass the stages quite quickly. I 100%ed it in about 4 hours and then instantly put the upcoming sequel on my wishlist.
My one complaint was a lack of inventory — even a small one or two item inventory would have been a great QOL improvement (this was most true in the pipe puzzle, where you had to move all the pieces through that crawlspace individually and it took a really long time). But this is a real nitpick.
Anyway I don’t have a ton to say about this game, I just think it nailed it. I think the tone was right — tongue-in-cheek but also kind of weirdly sinister in the right proportions — I think it was nice-looking with solid interior design, and I think the puzzle design was really excellent, highly varied and properly structured in terms of leading the player through it. I got emotionally attached to the package. A+.
The Inheritance of Crimson Manor
(MediaCity Games, 2022)
This game has forced me to confront the possibility that I just like being allowed to snoop around old Victorian houses. The Victorians really had an amazing sense of aesthetics and craftsmanship. And ghosts, they had good ghosts.
I bring this up because this game had truly immaculate vibes. The manor’s design was wonderful, each room decorated and assembled with a wonderful eye for interiors, but the gameplay itself was flawed in a couple ways that keep me from wholeheartedly recommending it. There was also a loose plot that wasn’t particularly engaging (it was phenomenally telegraphed) but was sufficient for the kind of game this is.
The biggest issue with this game is that it made the choice to not confine puzzles to rooms or even sections of the house. I can see how this seemed like a good idea — make things less obvious, give players an excuse to keep using spaces, make things less artificial. The problem is that this conceit has practical reasons for existing. For one, it was impossible to tell when you’d found everything in a room. Is that puzzle you can’t solve unsolveable right now, or did I miss something somewhere? There’s no way to tell. Second, it meant that I was constantly going, “Fuck, I know what I need for this, but what room was it in?” I 100ed this game in 4 hours, and an inordinate amount of that time was running around the map trying to remember where I’d seen the chest with a heart-shaped lock or whatever. Third, I apparently once accidentally brute-forced a puzzle and skipped a huge swath of the game by getting into a room early (I just thought you were supposed to guest-test-revise it, I didn’t realize there was a clue somewhere…). I had to go back later on and retrace my steps to catch up to where I’d gotten to. All of these problems are solved by restricting the puzzles to certain rooms (or, again, areas) and being done with them once you move on. I also don’t think this is a big verisimilitude problem — honestly, because most of the games have a guiding intelligence making the puzzles, it does make some sense they’d do them room-by-room. I can accept the evil mad scientist being a good game designer, lol.
So that’s the upshot, excellent tone and fun visuals (the penny dreadfuls were a great touch), but the game design could be a bit frustrating. On the whole I came out having quite enjoyed it, but those who aren’t a sucker for 19th-century ghost stories will probably have a less satisfying experience.
Escape First Alchemist
(OnSkull Games, 2023)
This is a tough one. I usually find complaints about games having bugs to be kind of stupid — especially for small indies — and my jank tolerance is very high, but this was so buggy it was at times difficult to play. It ranged from things like falling through floors randomly to achievements being bugged if you didn’t get all the collectibles in one gameplay session to more serious things like every time I tried to load a save file if I pressed “A” it would go back for some reason and then become unloadable unless I closed the application and rebooted then used the mouse cursor to load. At times it made the game nearly unplayable, and I only pushed through and finished because I knew it was also short. There was also a real stuttering problem, another thing that usually doesn’t bother me but was really bad here, and it was an issue on both PC and Deck. This is perhaps in part because the graphical adjustment options didn’t seem to do anything.
It’s a shame because the underlying game is solid, and does some things that were pretty neat. I really liked the conceit of being an alchemist and having to mix potions to overcome obstacles, and I like the balance of there being an auto-brew option but also if you play the minigame you can +1. I appreciated the little lore tidbits and object descriptions and thought the plot was above-average for one of these games. The puzzles were a smidge on the simplistic side and the lack of a journal meant sometimes I’d forget I’d left something unfinished (though this was less of an issue because the map was relatively small, so it being totally open largely worked), but on the whole the game itself was enjoyable and brought something I hadn’t seen yet to the table.
But the bugginess makes it pretty hard to recommend, as do the optimization issues. This game is a few years old now and I’m curious to see if there’s been improvement from this dev in terms of stability, since it looks like these issues have been there in all their older games as well. This *seems* like a real developer and not a content mill, but the lack of care implied by the pervasiveness of these issues does make me wonder, and that’s not a good impression to leave a player with.
Havsala
(Ubik Studios and Stratera Games, 2022)
This game first lost me at the abysmal opening narration. “I am the sexiest sexy woman and I love being sexy for men, but I’m also a supergenius who has studied everything and I will now list for you every -ology word the writers know, and also I’m going to keep repeating these facts over and over and over.” It was bad fanfic. It reminded me of Phantom of Manhattan actually, in that way that a character can’t just be special by virtue of being the protagonist, they have to be the specialest special to ever special. (Also, there’s this weird vibe that like, they felt like they had to justify a woman protagonist being smart by emphasizing that don’t worry, she’s also super hot and sexually available? It was kind of weird.)
The second and third time it lost me was the bigger problem: the game is full of grammatical errors, misspellings, and broken English. It was at times incomprehensible, and what of it I saw I saw largely because I know how these games are supposed to work and could suss out puzzles and gameplay mechanics. I progressed in spite of the fact that the text was nigh incomprehensible, against the game’s worst efforts.
I tried to play this game on three separate occasions and each time just found decoding the writing to be so exhausting and irritating I ended up quitting. At a certain point a game with this little polish and effort put into basic proofreading just ceases to be worth my time.