I find most hidden/escape/puzzle games, for me are not often challenging enough. This game has a “Clue”-esk vibe to it. Which I love. Clue is an old favorite of mine. So far the searches really make me work for it to get what I need. This game does not give you instructions as to how to solve things. That’s part of the difficulty I would assume? Which is great because not too many games really allow you to have to think. They pretty well guide you along. Not this one, I love that I exercise my brain in a way very few games (that I have played, this is obviously personal perspective here) have been able to accomplish. I enjoy that the puzzles are not monotonous, and hopefully will be more and more challenging as it goes. Storyline has plenty of holes for intrigue for the player to enjoy filling the gaps of who’s who and why.

The game plays like an escape room type game with a small story with well illustrated characters and environments. Gameplay is divided into levels narrowing down complexity per puzzle and can take a couple of hours or so to finish. While the story isn’t anything special, it is nice to have something that feeds into the puzzles. Puzzles usually make sense in relation to the story and each other, instead of just being random correlations like some escape games. The puzzle difficulty is a little all over the place, with some being ridiculously obvious and easy and others being so complicated they feel out of place. Some puzzles require outside knowledge and research to come up with the answers. This is a nice touch to in depth gameplay, but in contrast to the more abundant easier puzzles it can be hard to realize what’s required when you get to the more difficult ones. It can also be difficult to guess what the game wants you to do with a specific puzzle, where you will know the information for the answer but the way it’s inputted can be guesswork, leading to a lot of time just inputting things in different ways until finding what form of the answer the game wants.

The game is fun, interactive, and the puzzles are sometimes easy, sometimes challenging. I didn’t realize the nature of the game at first, which is that it’s basically like playing on onscreen escape room. Silly me, didn’t get the “escape” part of the title right away. So I ended up starting out a bit frustrated and using up way too many hints. The hints are very annoying, because the very first hint costs you several stars, yet gives you no brainer type info. I was already aware of what needs to happen, but I’m trying to figure out how I get there. To get the kind of hint I’m looking for costs way more stars than what I have. There was also one scene that annoyed me a bit because I understood the concept of what I was supposed to do, but every time I entered the answer, it was incorrect. I used up a ridiculous amount of stars on hints just for it to tell me what I already knew. Finally I decided to include something in my answer from an entirely different room...and what do you know, it was correct then. It was frustrating and I was down to very few stars at that point. Other than that and the annoyingly unhelpful hints, it seems to be a fun game.

At first I was a bit confused about how it all works, I caught on pretty quick. I enjoy solving the puzzles. I got stuck at a few of them but figured them out after spending a few minutes pondering. The only puzzle in this game that I had a problem with was the books on the shelf. The hint didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me and the only way that I solved it was by leaving the puzzle (still in the room) and looking at the shelf. Even after I had “solved” it I still didn’t really understand. I tried to click on the shelf again to see if I could look at them but it locked me out of the shelf. It would be nice if we could go back into the puzzles without starting the chapter over again to see and understand the puzzle. I wouldn’t need to interact with it obviously but it would be nice to get a visual after it kicks me out because sometimes I’m not ready when it does, or I’m still pondering the puzzle after I’ve finished it. Just some suggestions, but overall great game! Really enjoyed it. I’m looking into the other series as well. 👍