Room Escape Artist

The Submarine is a digital adaptation of an escape game created by Locked Amsterdam in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Room Escape Artist has a review of The Submarine in its original format from June 2017. This is a review of the digital adaptation of the same game.

Format

Style of Play: video adaptation of a real-life escape room

Required Equipment: computer with internet connection and headphones to avoid the echoes from Skype

Recommended Team Size: 1-4

Play Time: 90 minutes

Price: about €30 per person, varies slightly by team size

Booking: book online for a specific time slot

Description

In The Submarine, players direct a live avatar to explore the gamespace and interact with objects in a standard, linear escape room. The automatic on-screen inventory and 360-degree secondary view helped the gameplay significantly.

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Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

This looks like a pretty good submarine room. The game has a great inventory tracking system, which always makes gameplay so much easier. Locked Amsterdam also provides a 360-degree video that you can control to look around, which I consider instrumental to avoiding motion sickness in these games. On the whole, I had a fun time.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Secondary 360-degree view of the room was very helpful for exploration and navigation, though it would benefit from increased resolution
• + Excellent automatic inventory system, which made it easy to see what items were in play and zoom in for details
• +/- Extensive decor made searching harder, but out-of-play items were glued down
• +/- Game was largely linear, but with a smaller remote group that is less of an issue
• + GM was willing to try any action we suggested and let us discover the results ourselves
• + Very nice sets
• – Some of the puzzles would have been fun in person, but were not ideal for remote solving

Richard Burns’ Reaction

The Submarine was a good online adaptation of a standard escape room. There were some small initial web setup issues, but everything worked well during the game itself. The game has a linear puzzle flow which makes sense for online play, but I felt the inventory system worked well enough to support a nonlinear version that might better engage larger groups.

The puzzles were well done, but will be familiar to experienced players. Some lighting effects suffered in the online format. I am sure they would be much more impressive in the actual space. One high-pressure teamwork puzzle late in the game had to be somewhat bypassed due to there only being a single avatar in the room. It left me thinking of how it would have been to actually try and solve in person.

Overall it was a fine online escape room to play with one or two friends during a time of quarantine.