Developer: mc2games
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Verified
Rrp: £8.50 (Humble and Steam)
This is a first for me as this will be the first review I’ve written where I played the entire game on the Steam Deck. However, I do want to say that this wasn’t by choice, for whatever reason the cloud saving function on Steam just didn’t want to work with this game (despite trying all sorts of things to rectify the situation) and I just so happened to start playing on the Steam Deck. I haven’t found anything online about others having this problem with the game so perhaps it’s just me, but I think keep that in mind if you do happen to go to play this.
The thing about virtual escape rooms is that they can never really capture the feeling of the real thing. You don’t get that very slight sense of panic when the door locks and the adrenaline rush of completing the room before the time is up, along with a whole host of other emotions and experiences from having a real world adventure. But it’s not all bad, in most real world escape rooms you only get an hour to solve the various puzzles, in this game there isn’t such a timer. You can also save your progress so you can come back to puzzles later. There is what I consider the greatest strength of a virtual escape room, the game doesn’t have to follow the rules of the real world which leads to all sorts of potential.
Now is this a good escape room game? Well, it’s not bad. The controls on the Steam Deck are a bit on the fiddly side for my liking, requiring the player to line up a crosshair to a specific icon to interact with a puzzle rather than being able to click a more general area. I admit that’s a fairly minor thing to complain about but it was something that just kept bugging me throughout the entire game.
If you like a good puzzle game then I can definitely recommend this one, the puzzles themselves have quite a range in difficulty, I enjoyed them all but several left me scratching my head for quite some time.
