Season 0: Welcome to Argenia! is included in our recommendation guide for Play On-Demand Online Escape Games. For more of the best online escape games in this style, check out the recommendation guide.
Season 0: Welcome to Argenia! is a ARG-esque light puzzle hunt created by Webscapade.
Format
Style of Play:
- Online native experience (can NOT be played IRL)
- Play on demand
- Light puzzle hunt
Required Equipment: computer with internet connection
Recommended Team Size: 1-4
Play Time: about 90 minutes
Price: $25 per team
Booking: purchase and play at your leisure
Description
Welcome to Argenia! involved light ARG-style narrative puzzling. Players need to access a variety of webpages to progress through the game. There is simulated hacking as well as puzzles to solve. The story unfolds throughout the game.
Hivemind Review Scale
Read more about our Hivemind Review format.
Matthew Stein’s Reaction
Welcome to Argenia! is a fresh, polished take on the ARG-esque, light puzzle hunt format. While most other games in this format tend to feel formulaic, Welcome to Argenia! managed to break from the pack with its humorous, robust, and self-aware worldbuilding; creative, clever, and satisfying puzzle design; and seamless use of context-aware, player-friendly tech.
Furthermore, the market should look to this game as a paragon of tab management. Color-coded favicons helped categorize each tab, and the game instructed us when we could safely close certain tabs, thus avoiding the overwhelming deluge of unidentifiable tabs that usually plagues games of this format.
In this initial season, the designers of Welcome to Argenia! showed admirable restraint – the game was a great length, super reasonable price, and felt well edited. They also planted a number of highly intriguing narrative seeds, setting the stage for future seasons. This game is doing many things right, and I can’t wait to experience how the story continues.
Tammy McLeod’s Reaction
I had fun with this game. It is of the recently popular game style where you get to pretend that you are hacking websites to get information. A lot of care has obviously gone into the design of this one. The visuals look good, and the puzzles are properly clued. The interface has a very unique and thoughtful feature where as you progress through the puzzles, they tell you which of your many previous browser tabs can be closed. Overall, the level of polish of this game makes it quite worth playing.
Brett Kuehner’s Reaction
Dear Uncle Rory,
Thanks for the invitation, we had a mighty good visit to Argenia! I thought we’d be in a peaceful village, a quiet village, but I guess with a city named “Metropolia” I should have known better. However, even though we didn’t have time for drinks at the local watering hole like we expected, we did have a surprising amount of fun getting involved in local politics! We definitely got to see parts of the city most tourists don’t, and even a bit of local art. Some of it was a bit puzzling, but isn’t that often the case with art? And don’t fear, everyone we met had a terrific sense of humor that kept us laughing, and the mane event at the end of our trip had us all feline good.
Argenia really is its own little world, and everything we needed was right where you said it would be. You gave excellent directions, so we always knew where we were and what information we needed. I really appreciated your tips on when I should tidy up the tabs in my travel guide; it helped me avoid the confusion I sometimes have when taking trips like this.
From the maps you gave us, it looks like there are a lot of other cities in Argenia that we didn’t get a chance to see. The trip was quite inexpensive, so I look forward to visiting again and seeing more of the country soon!
Your darling nephew,
Brett
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Disclosure: Webscapade provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.