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Wednesday, September 14, 2022 10:45:41 PM

Escape Simulator Review (G00N3R)

Escape Simulator is a puzzle game set in Egyptian, space, mansion and office themed escape rooms.
If you’ve played any similar games most of the puzzle types will feel familiar. Search around the room and look inside drawers and other containers to find keys and other important items and clues. Decipher symbols and riddles to identify numbered codes, use letters to spell passwords, rearrange pictures into the correct order, and use spare parts to repair machines.
Most of the puzzles are well designed. The store page seems to suggest that playing coop is best, but I had no problems playing solo. In most cases the puzzles need to be solved one at a time anyway to acquire the next item or clue that is needed to solve the next puzzle. It took me 9 hours to complete the official rooms and in addition to this there are community designed rooms which I haven’t tried yet, so there’s a lot of content.
However, this game has one significant flaw – your progress within each room is not saved. If you exit the game before completing a room, you’ll have to start that room again from the beginning.
One of the most important tools in my puzzle solving arsenal is simply walking away when I’m stuck, and then trying again later. Usually when I come back to a puzzle and look at it again with fresh eyes, I’ll see something that I missed before, or I’ll have a different idea about how to interpret the clues. But doing that in this game could mean losing 10-15 minutes of progress on multiple other puzzles within the room, so on the few occasions that I was seriously stuck, I felt pressured to solve it immediately.
There were a few times, especially in the space and office themed rooms, where I needed a 3 digit code to enter into a 0-9 keypad, but because there was something that I didn’t understand in the moment and I didn’t want to have to do the whole room again, I just sat and brute forced it. 000. 001. 002. 003. And yeah, I got it done eventually, but I didn’t enjoy having to do that. If the game would save my progress, I’m sure I would have been able to solve those puzzles properly, which would have been much more fun.
Overall Escape Simulator is a good game, but that one serious design flaw causes some moments of extreme frustration that I don’t usually feel while playing my favourite puzzle games.