Room Escape Artist

Enigmaticon is a point-and-click game created by Enigmaticon.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click

Who is it For?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers

Required Equipment: Mobile Device

Recommended Team Size: 1

Play Time: about 60-90 minutes

Price: $1.99

Booking: play at your leisure

Description

Phone Escape: Hopeless is an app-based puzzle game intended to be played on a mobile phone. Upon starting the game you find yourself locked in a basement armed only with a cellphone. The app emulates a phone with basic functionalities including a camera, flashlight, text messaging, calling, and an app to request puzzle hints. Several other apps are added to the faux phone during gameplay as needed to solve puzzles. A mysterious persona reaches out consistently via text to direct you to the next puzzle to solve and to provide a vague storyline.

Scott Olson’s Reaction

Having style and substance is what creates standouts in any immersive puzzle experience. While Phone Escape: Hopeless succeeds in the style department with creepy visuals and sound, appropriately creating a trapped by a madman vibe, it struggles with substance. The player interacts with their captor via a basic phone-like interface, defending themselves from accusations of crimes that they may or may not have committed. Aspects of the story are pieced together through solving basement puzzles in a linear fashion, with little freedom to explore. The puzzles are different in their style, difficulty, and clarity without a connective or logical flow. Multi-layered puzzles provided no feedback that the player is on the right track and the hint system only gives basic direction. The “phone” aspect, while interesting for story development, could have been used in more creative ways. Phone Escape: Hopeless is fine enough but does not distinguish itself from the many other low-cost mobile point-and-click escape room games.

Ryan Brady’s Reaction

Phone Escape: Hopeless‘ story was interesting, I was invested in completing the next step so I could learn more. The environment and props were nice for a 3D phone game, though I was frustrated by my inability to explore freely until late in the game.

Some puzzles could’ve used some more cluing; on some I was just messing around blindly until I stumbled over the answer. Relatedly, I felt like the hint system sometimes stopped too early. Even with all the hints I wasn’t sure what one puzzle wanted me to do.

I would’ve loved the ability to draw on the screen to save the trouble needing of an external note source.

Overall, though there are flaws, there were a decent amount of puzzles wrapped in a potentially interesting narrative, and the technical quality is good for the price point. I look forward to further chapters.

Christina Rohlf’s Reaction

Phone Escape: Hopeless was a short app-driven phone game that took me about 45 minutes to complete. At the start of the game, I found myself locked in a basement with a multitude of puzzles and a text message from a mysterious persona, presumably my kidnapper. The game moved linearly from puzzle to puzzle and only one puzzle was available for interaction at any given time. There were a total of 16 puzzles in the game with a variety of puzzle types: visual puzzles, pattern recognition, and manipulation puzzles. In general, most of the puzzles were fun and relatively easy. Two puzzles did require some relatively common outside knowledge. Toward the middle of the game, I found one puzzle to be particularly frustrating due to vague directions and lack of information. To make matters worse, the in-game hint system did not provide enough information to help solve this vague puzzle. Furthermore, one interaction toward the beginning of the game was also difficult to recognize as a puzzle; I ended up solving this puzzle at hazard. I also found the storyline of this game to be unclear and ended the game very confused about what had happened. We currently find ourselves in a bit of a renaissance of Indie publishers making mobile and PC puzzle games. Due to the puzzle design flaws and confusing story, I would not recommend Phone Escape: Hopeless over many other titles in the market.

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

Waking up in a dark basement, all you have is a phone. You need to use its functions to figure out where you are, what happened, and how to get out of here.

At its best, having a mobile game with a phone as the main navigation method is not only meta but also clever. There were a few smart hidden functions built in. Each challenge was different and we regained our memory piece by piece.

At its worst, one puzzle needed a tiny bit of guesswork or at least some outside knowledge, while another one was under-clued and had no connection to the story. The last task had an icky color variation, making it unnecessarily harder than it needed to be. Additionally, the plot became somewhat cliche towards the end.

With its intuitive controls, it’s easy to get started and get lost in the strange universe of this app. Overall, it’s a solid game with a compelling mechanism.

Cara Mandel’s Reaction

I appreciate when game designers swing for the proverbial fences. Phone Escape: Hopeless felt like one such example of this. The game was fairly impressive in its design and functionality. There were multiple locations with different puzzles to solve of varying degrees of difficulty. The sound design was very well executed. The game intro instructed you to play in a dark room using headphones, which I did. It led to a very creepy atmosphere and I enjoyed the setting. Narratively speaking, however, it wasn’t a home run for me (no clue why I’m using all these baseball metaphors but, alas). I appreciate what the game designers were going for, but it felt a little ham-fisted for me at times. I don’t want to spoil any of the twists, but I did end the game feeling a bit confused and had a sense that I was meant to have been more emotionally impacted than I was. Still, the game employed some interesting mechanics and for the low price point, was certainly worth checking out if you are interested in the mobile gaming genre as a whole.

Disclosure: Enigmaticon provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.