I found my happy place! escape simulator is such a beautiful thing, a first-person simulacrum of escape rooms built in 3D, with realistic physics. It is, as the title suggests, a simulation of visiting a real escape room, in a way that almost all roomEscape video games are not. Except when it’s in space.
Let me clear that up. I love throwaway room escape games, with their stupid puzzles, ridiculous attempts at storylines, and their deeply weird obsession with throwing away any useful tool after it’s only been used once. I love the really good ones even more, and none beat Rusty Lake’s Dice series. But none of this is like playing in a real escape room.
escape simulatorThe huge number of incredibly detailed rooms varies between easy replicated in the world, and gloriously impossible given our relative inaccessibility to space travel. There are familiar office environments, posh country mansions, and indeed, a futuristic spaceship. But each one works the same way: You’re in a room, there’s a a lot of
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What makes the search all the more special here is the first-person perspective combined with the realistic physics. That means you can pull heavy boxes off shelves, move office chairs out of the way, throw pesky books across the room, and just wreak havoc. Or you can actually be much more methodical about things, be very clean and tidy, and even dispose of unnecessary items by throwing them in the trash.
With each new room, you take a moment to orient yourself, look around all four walls, and then start searching the location for clues. There will be notes, sticky notes, strange patterns on walls, keys hidden behind flower pots, and so on. You collect everything that seems important, take a closer look by pressing the spacebar and then inspect items in 3D, and start piecing together possible combinations for padlocks, passwords, and code-solving.
Each room (except one) has a 15 minute timer, but that’s only for one trophy. Once that timer is up, nothing changes, and while I’ve completed some rooms in less time, I found things in others far more relaxing when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to and just took my time.
The 22 rooms are grouped into four groups of five and a few bonus rooms at the end. You can approach them in any order, but there’s a gentle difficulty curve if you play them in order. When everyone is done, you can either jump into the room creation tool or play the ones made by others.
A The developers’ DLC pack is due in June and is steampunk themed and this time with larger rooms. These can also be played in co-op, all aboard an airship, and try to escape before things go kablooie. These will be larger levels so the four new rooms are expected to offer four hours of playtime.
The game came out in October, and while it was incredibly well received on Steam, it had a deeply peculiar lack of press coverage. This is so damn good and it made me happy all week.
There’s even a co-op mode, so you can be trapped in these escape rooms with a buddy, which sounds absolutely amazing. But alone, escape simulator offers a much more tangible feel for the feel of playing a real life escape room, spaceship aside, and keeps things within the realm of possibility. Ooh I can’t wait for the DLC.
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