Comments on: Room Escape: A Secret Giant?

By: Mikalye

Mikalye — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:41:05 +0000

I do play them. I would hesitate to call myself an aficionado, but give me a lunch break and it fills the gap nicely, particularly, as I usually can play these on my office computer without violating any of the blocking, which is not true of most games. I think that there is a huge appetite for very short break games. I suspect that this (as well as the extremely attractive economics) is behind the popularity of the Travian-clones and other persistent browser based games.

They are played, a lot.

By: Jetsetlemming

Jetsetlemming — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:49:27 +0000

It seems the first Escape the Room game (the one where you’re in a one room apartment/motel room, and your ultimate goal is to find a key and doorknob for the exit door) came out only a few months ago in my memory.
I actually decently like these games, at least when they’re well made and don’t require me to endlessly click shit to pixel hunt for that one little hidden screen (that original game did, you had to click in one tiny little area to get the view to shift to behind the bed to find a battery), and don’t require calculus and knowledge of piano keys and dead languages to solve the logic puzzles. It really is though, just not something you think to talk about and recommend to friends. Maybe because the games themselves are so small and low-key.

It’s funny, when you think about it, how many proclaim adventure games to be deader than dead, when really what happened is Sierra and Lucasarts quit and the internet took over en masse.

By: MadTinkerer

MadTinkerer — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:04:19 +0000

Actually, the Penumbra series is kind of a cross between first-person-stealth and Room Escape.

Also see Science & Industry. A few of those puzzles were Myst-level infuriating.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:15:32 +0000

So you’ve played one game in the genre and assumed the rest are the same… and something happened with your kid and a book. What?

By: Ira

Ira — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:56:04 +0000

The novels were surprisingly good. My wife who is definitely NOT a gamer nor knows anything about Myst read the books on my recommendation and now is recommending them to all her friends.

By: baf

baf — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:00:07 +0000

The thing is, though, that in the RPG or FPS genre, once you’ve found a good, you can just play that a lot and ignore the bad ones. Room Escapes are intrinsically short and usually have no replayability whatever. (I’ve seen a few that provide some kind of multiple endings or collectibles, but even that just extends the playtime from a lunch break to two lunch breaks.) So when I play Room Escapes, I wind up spending proportionately less of my time on the really good ones than I do in these other genres.

This is really a problem borne by adventures in general, but it’s intensified in Room Escapes.

By: The Dark One

The Dark One — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:32:00 +0000

I really loved the game, too. Even if it was a hacked version of Hypercard, it was still a pusher- Myst was the game that pushed my family to buy a soundcard. The world was really well put together, and it’s basically the only time I’ve sought out spinoff novels based on a game’s universe (I did read a Warcraft book, but it came free with my Frozen Throne expansion).

By: patton

patton — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:41:15 +0000

So you have time to do this instead of Risen ? :(
Well, i have never really liked room escape games, mainly because they have ridicilous puzzles, and annoying pixel hunting, so i can find some random item so i can escape.

By: mister_d

mister_d — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:39:15 +0000

Meant in response to Severian >.<

By: mister_d

mister_d — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:38:36 +0000

So I tried Guest House and escaped the room — yay! The only hard part was figuring out that stuff was hidden behind objects, especially one of the coins which was a bit of a pixel hunt. I didn’t expect what happened though and it was somewhat satisfying to complete.

I was escape number 123297 which I assume is a count, so it’s obviously fairly popular.

By: JonFitt

JonFitt — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:56:04 +0000

I see the Room Escape genre as reductionist point-and-click adventures. They remove the graphics and story and distil them down to their base elements, which is finding items, and using them.

Even the fact that it only takes place in one room doesn’t really make it any different. It might look like in a point-and-click you go somewhere, but you really don’t. Unlocking a box in a room escape is like unlocking a new screen in a point-and-click. Placing items in a Crows Nest and a Galley is only just drawing out the distance between two items which need to be combined.

Some are tedious pixel hunts, but then so were some old point-and-click games. The puzzles may sometimes be difficult involving pen and paper, but I would argue these are more like games than some point-and-click adventures which are little more than cartoons with put-the-round-chicken-in-the-square-hole-to-continue blocks.

A room escape is often The Times Crossword to a point-and-click’s The Sun Wordsearch.

That being said, I love point-and-clicks and think the story and setting is important, but I think they could learn a thing or two from some of the better room escape puzzles.

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:53:34 +0000

Theory: there are a lot of room escape games because they are very easy to make.