Room Escape Artist

Escape Teams’s Training Mission and 9 subsequent missions are print-and-play games with a companion app.

Format

Style of Play:

• print-and-play

Who is it For?

• Any experience level

Required Equipment: mobile device, printer, paper, scissors, and tape

Recommended Team Size: 1-3

Play Time: 10-40 minutes per mission

Price: First 2 missions are free, then $2.99 per mission

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

You print out the mission you want to play. You download the app and buy the corresponding game. You solve the puzzles on paper and enter 5-digit solutions into the app, which gets you from phase to phase. The app also serves as a clue-giver. Expect 4-6 pages per mission, with clues spread over multiple pages.

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

This is a pen-and-paper escape game where you try to help the secret service to capture some bad folks. To get a better grip on the experience, I played multiple of their missions (missions 1-9).

At its best, with the printed pages and the app, it’s easy to get started. If you don’t want to commit to hours of puzzling, this is a great quick bit. Each mission comes with some audio available in 8 languages. If you enter a partially wrong code, the system lets you know up to which digit you’re right and what to double-check. Also, the first phase in mission 7 was pretty neat.

At its worst, the time given for each mission is too short. It leaves no opportunity for layered solves or aha moments. There should either be a longer duration or an option to turn the timer off completely. Additionally, the story is surprisingly hollow and the far-from-groundbreaking puzzles never support the theming. Expect sudokus and word searches is all I’m saying.

With the exception of 1 or 2 games (for example, mission 4), you can save paper by printing 2 pages on 1 piece (not double-sided though).

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Dramatic audio intros, and there are multiple voice actors in different episodes
• – The rest of the audio is well-performed, but is not narratively interesting and leans into cliche
• + Application was easy to set up and use
• + Good progressive hinting that gives you the level of help you want, and the last hint gives a full answer
• + Hints are time-released, but I didn’t feel like I had to wait in the cases where I took a hint
• ? Lots of papercraft. If you like cutting and taping shapes and puzzle pieces, you may enjoy it, but some of the crafting takes longer than solving the puzzles
• – One puzzle had ambiguity in the solution
• – Some of the puzzles are not very interesting, are force-fit into the narrative, and/or require too many repetitions
• + The background music creates a good ambiance without being distracting
• – One or two of the puzzles had labeling that made me confused about which numbered puzzle was which

Scott Olson’s Reaction

I am a firm believer in separating sweet and salty foods—you will never catch me dipping my bacon into maple syrup. Similarly, standard pen and paper puzzles, while enjoyable, feel out of place in an escape room. The Escape Team has recreated this experience at home with puzzles players print themselves. Depending on your printer quality, some puzzles can be hard to read and challenging to interact with. Each mission has a diverse set of puzzles which our team found fine but generally lacking novelty or a cohesive narrative. As the difficulty increased, we divided the work to solve the mission in time. While this is expected in an escape room, it is not what I enjoy in a tabletop game. The app works well to provide the mission briefing, input, and clues, letting you know with utmost seriousness that lives are on the line while you solve a sudoku, maze, or math puzzle. While not our combination of flavors, Escape Team puzzles are free to try and low cost for subsequent missions.

Disclosure: Escape Team provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.