MOAR
Good: Escape from Castle Claymount, BOXES
Meh: Detective Ridelle
Bad: 12 Memory Lane
Escape from Castle Claymount
(STUDIO LOOK, 2024)
I am perpetually astounded by the freeware that’s out there. This reminded me of Sheepy, in that I felt like I’d gotten away with something playing it for free.
This is an utterly brilliant escape room game, and it’s flabbergasting that it’s free. The puzzles are brilliantly designed and delightfully unique, the claymation aesthetic is original and expressive, the ‘photographic memory’ system is a wonderfully simply way to solve the notebook problem, and the entire experience is just a delight from top to bottom.
Definitely recommend for fans of games like Rusty Lake, but also for people who are new to or not totally sold on the genre and just want a lovely experience.
IMO this deserves to be one of the most popular 2D escape rooms out there.
BOXES: Lost Fragments
(Big Loops Studios, 2024)
I did not expect this to be this good. For one, it’s called “Boxes.” For another I didn’t think every stage being a puzzle box would work.
But this was exceptional. First, it was a truly gorgeous-looking game. I’m not sure if these are in-house assets, but regardless, the arrangement and sense of color and light was just really superb. Second, I am an enormous fan of the camera system! Not making us trundle around and just automatically and smoothly panning the camera completely removes the motion sickness issue and more games should do this, it’s one of those brilliantly simple solutions I can’t believe I’ve never seen before.
But most importantly, the puzzle design was incredible. Every box feels like a completely unique experience, and the puzzles themselves are so much more creative and engaging than most of these games — they feel like setpieces in a world instead of discrete puzzles. Further, I think the game really accomplished giving everything a tactile feel — every knob, lever, screw seemed to have weight and volume to it. IMO this is the closest any of these games has come to emulating escape rooms as a physical experience, and it’s not even close.
The hint system was perfect, helping you out when you missed an interactable spot with no penalties for using it.
I’m very curious to go back through the rest of this developer’s games, and am looking forward to their followup next year.
Detective Ridelle
(PuzzLab, 2024)
The highlight of this game was the character art, which was expressive and unique. Props to their artist, it has a real style to it I liked a lot.
Other than that this game really dragged. The writing was serviceable and could be quite good, but was often self-indulgent and lost in its own QUIRKY!!!!1 nonsense. It was tolerable until the denoument, where the game slams on the brakes (hah) and makes you stand there and recount step by step every little thing that had happened, reading-quiz style. It was unbearable, honestly. It’s like it couldn’t figure out a naturalistic way for Ridelle to solve the mystery to it just stopped and had the stupidest character handhold everyone through the entire premise. Ridelle was really stupid, and her manic-pixie sidekick was even worse. Both of them were so, so far behind everything the entire game. The more I think about it, the truth was the writer could do character but really could not do plot.
The puzzle design was just bad. The bulk of the game’s puzzles take the form of… insanely elaborate memos the characters have left themselves in their rooms? Like, the idea that each character has set up these insane puzzles in their traincars over the course of like 20 minutes is… is it supposed to be funny? It’s beyond immersion-breaking, it’s just bizarre. There’s been a murder, just make them give you their safe codes, DETECTIVE.
All the puzzles in the game, every single one, is finding number strings, and the game attempts to conceal this by making it as difficult as possible to figure out what the puzzle even is. That seems to be the game’s idea of increasing difficulty: making it as unclear as possible what you’re being asked to do. The hints were beyond useless, I’d be like “Maybe I’m in this room early and I’ll get an item that makes it clear what the puzzle is?” than I’d go for a hint and she’d be like “You probably need to find a string of numbers” and yeah, I get it, I know.
Frankly I’m not sure why this was an escape game and not a visual novel; the developer doesn’t seem to particularly care about puzzle and game design but could do character interactions well. I think with a good editor to keep them reigned in, and a scenario writer to help with plot, they could produce a good visual novel. But there’s nothing salvageable here in terms of gameplay.
12 Memory Lane
(Forget-Me-Not Studio, 2025)
This was freeware by what’s clearly a new studio, so I’m not going to post this to Steam, but I need to tell someone how terrible this was. It was just awful. Unsalvageable.
It’s of the very stupid (and frankly borderline offensive) “dementia patient writes effluent prose about not being able to communicate” genre, and it has all the flaws of that genre plus its own. Gameplay wise, it’s not an escape room, or a deduction game. It’s basically a book report. Like, you read this journal, and then you go click around until your environment matches what’s written in the journal. The game even highlights the relevant lines in yellow for you. It was honestly deeply strange as a gameplay experience, not least because sometimes the info you need required just fucking guessing because it wasn’t in the journal. But mostly it was like a standardized test, where they give you a short passage and then you have to answer multiple-choice questions to see if you understood. I honestly don’t even know how you get to this point in terms of gameplay. What is this.
The plot was… like, I think what it thought it was doing was a “twist” where the dude’s family hates him because he gave his alcoholic sibling an ultimatum, but you’re supposed to think it’s because he threw his gay son out of the house? Like I think that’s what they were doing? But I genuinely don’t know, as it seems like he does hate his son for being gay? And there’s also a weird implication he killed the sister? Or she killed herself? Or she died incidentally? It’s genuinely impossible to tell. Also his wife hates him, but this is somehow completely incidental.
Also the game seems to think the phrase, “We don’t have room for strays” is like, the worst thing you could ever say to someone? Like, there’s this whole THAT THING I SAID THAT DESTROYED MY FAMILY subplot, and I was assuming he called his son a slur, because that’s how everyone was acting, but actually the thing that broke up the family and hurt every single one irreparably was saying he couldn’t keep enabling his sister by taking her in like a “stray” and the son is even like “the word stray hurt me real bad” and ??????????? This whole thing was so bizarre I almost wonder if the dev’s first language isn’t English, and they translated a slur or derogatory term from their language, but didn’t realize the connotation wouldn’t translate? That’s the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for this entire thing. What’s the next step beyond Moon Logic, Saturn Logic? Pluto Logic? I just kept waiting for the Terrible Thing He Said and then it never happened, lol.
Also this was very buggy.
But mostly it was stupid. So, so stupid. Infuriatingly stupid.