Format

Style of Play:

• Research and investigation

Who is it For?

• Story seekers
• Readers
• Best for players with some experience

Required Equipment: Computer with internet connection, or a Steam Deck

Recommended Team Size: 1-2

Play Time: Expect 3-5 hours

Price: $6.99

Booking: Purchase and play at your leisure

Description

TR-49 is a puzzle investigation game in which the player is tasked with exploring and understanding the titular TR-49 machine in an alternate history universe.  Gameplay revolves around exploring an archive in nonlinear fashion by finding and entering codes into a machine. The story also unfolds via voiceover with subtitles.

Sarah Wilson’s Reaction

TR-49 shares DNA with investigation games like The Roottrees Are Dead, Immortality, and Type Help, with the gameplay consisting entirely of exploring a database to unspool a larger story. Normally I love this type of deduction game, but TR-49’s design choices made it more frustrating than fun for me.

The machine at the center of the research had some quirks and unpredictability that departed from the genre’s conventions in interesting ways, but also proved aggravating at times. The frequent chatter between the two main characters interrupted my flow; even though it was usually optional, I couldn’t be sure whether their conversation might be relevant to the puzzling. And the interface provided automatic note-taking, but the filing system wasn’t always explained, and the notes sometimes stated a connection I hadn’t yet put together myself. Side note: I’d recommend making your own notes, especially if you prefer less guidance in puzzle games.

Story-wise, TR-49 was somber, complex, and urgent—a demanding combination. I enjoyed the fact that a few clever deductions revealed more about the characters, but in the end I still wasn’t entirely clear about what was going on. Ultimately this game wasn’t for me, but I can see how people with more patience and a literary bent would appreciate it more.

Jacky Chang’s Reaction

I found the first 90% of TR-49 reasonably interesting and thought the core mechanic was fun. The game was very atmospheric, and I enjoyed discovering how I was meant to connect the various sources to their titles. For the bulk of the game, I had a lot of great aha moments as I pulled together all the scraps of information, and the voice acting and personal stories woven into the puzzles were very engaging.

I did have some issues with the interface being clunky and the overlapping text/ audio content being overwhelming. Eventually there was too much information for me to keep track of effectively, and I wish there had been some way for me to annotate in the game where I needed to still follow up. If you have ADHD, I would recommend only playing this when you’re fresh and haven’t exhausted your executive function for the day. Being able to chase a thread and then pop back up the stack to explore another path is important for not getting too lost. I ended up getting very frustrated at the end of the game when I just needed to find one last piece of information – I think a third of my play time was spent chasing the last source. That frustration sadly marred the rest of the experience for me, and by the ending sequence, I just really wanted the game to be done. It’s a real shame because the game has a number of alternative endings and some Easter eggs that I probably would have enjoyed uncovering if I hadn’t been so annoyed.

Lyra Levin’s Reaction

An eerie, story-rich deduction game that does a lot with a little — delve into the mysterious interface of TR-49 to discover the secrets of this enigmatic machine and the people caught in its gears. Though the pacing and urgency of the story and gameplay didn’t always align, both were excellent with completionists rewarded by a depth of material to explore and several satisfying endings. The texture and sound design of the game’s interface also deserve a call-out, though I found playing on a Steam Deck clunkier than I expect a keyboard and mouse would have been. Recommended for fans of The Roottrees are Dead, Her Story, and Type Help.

The post TR-49 [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Asymmetric co-op. One player uses VR, and the other player is on a mobile device.

Who is it For?

• Best for experienced, patient puzzle solvers
• Players with VR experience

Required Equipment: Meta Quest or Valve Index VR hardware; mobile device

Recommended Team Size: 2

Play Time: up to 30 hours

Price: $24.99

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

Elsewhere Electric is a two-player co-op game where one player uses a VR headset and the other uses their mobile phone to explore an underground laboratory. Because players shouldn’t see each other’s screens and there’s no built in voice chat, they need to find another way to talk, either by being in the same room or through another method remotely. The VR player will explore the facility, while the mobile player will unlock doors and equipment for them to use.

Theresa Piazza’s Reaction

Games by Stitch created a unique co-op game in Elsewhere Electric, but its gameplay prevents me from recommending this widely. The developers decided both players didn’t need to 1) purchase the game or 2) be familiar with Steam to play Elsewhere Electric, which significantly expanded who I could invite to play this game (always something I’m looking for). While one player needs a complicated setup (steam and VR headset), the other player only needs their mobile phone. Unfortunately the ease of playing ends there.

There’s no onboarding and no narrative story, so players have to be inherently curious about this game to continue playing past the opening screen. Additionally, because neither player should see the other’s screen, players must constantly describe their view to one another. Those elements are a recipe for frustration. Games by Stitch then piles on complications with mechanics like devices draining energy while using resources (reasonable) and invisible alien monsters stealing your energy (excessive) in certain rooms. Solving the puzzle mentally and then failing to execute physically against some arbitrary time limit or finicky piece of technology in an IRL escape room tops the list of my most frustrating experiences, and I couldn’t finish Elsewhere Electric as that seems to be its modus operandi.

Elsewhere Electric would benefit from an on ramp on either the VR or mobile players’s side, but I think most importantly it could also use two difficulty modes. One as is, and one that turns off elements of the games that put players under time pressure, so solvers can get the satisfaction of completing puzzles without needing to repeat the task over and over.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

This game started off promising with an intriguing premise. This is a Mandatory Asynchronous co-op game, with one person using VR and the other using a phone app. There were simultaneous challenges of discovery and communication. We had to figure out the interface, environment, and goals without any information or tutorial from the game. Meanwhile, we also had to figure out what we were even supposed to be communicating to each other.

The friction of this introductory experience caused me to lose my partner after an hour of trying to even reach something that felt like a fun puzzle. Unfortunately, it seemed like an asymmetric experience for the players, and a very patient phone partner will be required. I loved the concept, and found the VR portion that I did get to experience promising, but as a casual solo puzzler, this game is probably not my cup of tea.

Ryan Brady’s Reaction

Elsewhere Electric has a 70’s retro-future aesthetic that is refreshingly different and fun to be in. This game takes a huge swing for the fences with its central design concept: the game will tell you nearly nothing. Next to no world-building, no tutorial (beyond one critical item), no manual, nothing.

I believe the intention is for this to be a journey of discovery for players as they poke and prod, slowly determining how the world works. However, for us this was instead a journey of frustration as we struggled to understand how to accomplish simple tasks because we either didn’t understand the game system, or worse, had come up with our own incorrect assumption.

This frustration was compounded by the fact that failure in Elsewhere Electric is very punishing. Most actions require the use of a resource that can only be replenished through a tedious process that involves two scene transitions and starting the level over. I admit this process is thematic, but we were often hesitant to experiment because wasting the resource meant more trips to the van. I think the game would be substantially improved by ameliorating this somehow.

I firmly believe there’s a specific kind of puzzler out there for whom Elsewhere Electric will be perfectly targeted, but it wasn’t us. If that sounds like you, consider taking a leap, but I think this one will be feast or famine for most players.

Disclosure: Games by Stitch provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.

The post Games by Stitch – Elsewhere Electric [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click
• Rule discovery

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience

Required Equipment: Computer with internet connection

Recommended Team Size: 1

Play Time: 2-3 hours

Price: $4.99

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

Strange Jigsaws is a video game in which a series of puzzles are presented as different styles of jigsaw puzzles. As the game progresses, they increase in complexity and abstraction.

Peih Gee Law’s Reaction

Every single time after I solved a puzzle in Strange Jigsaws, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. All throughout the gameplay, we kept asking ourselves “who thinks of this stuff?!”

This game isn’t really about jigsaws, except in the most basic sense. Rather, it’s puzzles disguised as jigsaws. The creator is clearly someone who understands the nuance of jigsaw puzzles. This game does some funky meta things that very much gives the feel of solving a jigsaw, from the act of sorting pieces and making small connections until you see the whole picture.

The puzzles were weird and brilliant, and made me feel weird and brilliant, in the best way possible.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

I was excited about this game because I am a huge jigsaw puzzle fan. This is NOT a jigsaw puzzle game. Ostensibly it appears to be, but it is actually a logic puzzle game at heart – a genre which I also happen to love. The fact that the interface uses jigsaws is whimsical and comes across as a hilarious inside joke. It wields its MS Paint aesthetic ironically (the puzzles are sophisticated and refreshing) and I found it quite charming, and the levels went by quite quickly. It provided sufficient value for its low cost, but I found myself wishing for more.

Andrew Reynolds’ Reaction

Strange Jigsaws was a short game about solving jigsaws. But it was more than just that. These jigsaws evolved into logic puzzles and lateral thinking puzzles that tended to push the envelope of exactly what a jigsaw puzzle could be. Strange Jigsaws only lasted about 3 hours, but it was quality time spent thinking about how to solve a series of creative puzzles. In that short time, Strange Jigsaws even managed to layer in a short but endearing narrative that pieced the whole game together in the end. If you like a game that encourages you to figure out its rules while you’re playing it, Strange Jigsaws is a great choice for an evening’s entertainment.

The post Strange Jigsaws [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click
• Web-based inventory system
• Includes video segments

Who is it For?

• Adventure seekers
• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level

Required Equipment: Computer with internet connection

Recommended Team Size: 2-4

Play Time: about 120 minutes (no game clock)

Price: $35

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

Similarly to the other games from Wolf Escape Games, one player opens the game in a browser tab and is given clear instructions on how to stream the game to other players. Remote players access via browser a “virtual backpack” where items and information are collected so each player can review them individually. The host player is the only one that can interact with the game itself, so communication over video chat is necessary.

The game itself is mostly point-and-click to find puzzles and clues, with some typing answers in as well. After puzzles are solved, there are (really good) cinematics that act as scene transitions.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

I’ve played tons of online escape games, and The Pharaoh’s Tomb stood out. Great story, strong voice acting, and surprisingly polished animation and music. Its production values far exceeded the norm for the genre. The puzzles included some hefty logic challenges that required real teamwork to solve efficiently. The interface was intuitive and well-designed for group play, though the experience definitely benefits from having a host player who’s good at taking input from the rest of the team.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Excellent onboarding made it easy to get remote players set up
• + “Backpack” mechanism allowed remote players to view items and documents so that everyone could contribute to the puzzle solving
• + The voice acting, audio, and cinematics are even better than in the already-terrific previous games from Wolf Escape
• – Navigation was confusing in a few locations
• + Puzzles were generally well-clued and nicely themed
• – Puzzle types felt less varied in this game than in previous games
• + Good puzzle entry mechanics – once we knew the answer, it was easy to enter
• + New puzzle tracker mechanism gave a good sense of progress and indication of how much gameplay remained
• + We learned the word “opisometer” as a side-effect of playing the game
• + Entertaining story with a few twists along the way
• + Appropriately dramatic ending

Andrew Reynolds’ Reaction

Wolf Escape Games has delivered another winner with their newest game, The Pharaoh’s Tomb. They have a formula that works for them and they stick to it, making little improvements along the way. The Pharaoh’s Tomb returned to using Sherlock and Watson as the protagonists in a way that didn’t feel cliche. Like their previous Sherlock game (Phantom’s Hour) many of the puzzles had a deduction aspect that felt right in line with the fictional detective.

The Pharaoh’s Tomb continued the tradition of Wolf Escape Games providing us with stellar visuals and audio. The introductory and interstitial cutscenes were visually pleasing and engaging, and fit very well into the action itself. They even included a travel montage that felt and looked perfectly in place within the world of the game.

An upgrade that we noticed as we played was in the entry method of some of our solutions. More than once we commented on how well-fit the solution entry was to a puzzle. It doesn’t seem like much, but having a variety of well considered input methods makes a game feel more thought out. And with Wolf Escape Games being so good the way they are, any improvements just take something already good and makes it even better.

The post Wolf Escape Games – The Pharaoh’s Tomb [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click

Who is it For?

This game was designed for corporate team building, but there was not enough content to justify it as a standalone game. There was definitely an effort at story and there were puzzles, but they felt like exercises strung together rather than a cohesive experience.

Required Equipment: computer with an internet connection, voice conferencing connection such as Zoom or Google Meet

Recommended Team Size: 2-4

Play Time: about 40 minutes

Price: $249 per team, geared toward corporate team building

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

Using a web-based interface, and a separate video calling platform, your team progresses through the world of Dream Team, entering a character’s dreams to… save her in some way?

This game is designed to be played in a web browser, and everyone is playing in the same instance of the game. The inventory is not shared, but the progress is. Some puzzles require interaction and information sharing.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Early puzzles required teamwork and communication, or at least benefitted from them
• – Teamwork seemed limited or less valuable in much of the later part of the game
• – Several choices were required, but it was not clear either before or after what our choices meant
• + The game voting mechanism was more systematic than voice-only voting
• + Some variety of puzzle types, including a light logic puzzle
• – None of the puzzles was very deep or satisfying
• – Final sequence was very confusing, and it was unclear if it was possible to complete
• – Ending seemed sudden and especially unsatisfying
• – Game felt short overall, given the price and lack of live host
• ? The analysis goals are good, but the results don’t seem justified by the gameplay. They drew conclusions from what feels like insufficient data.

Theresa Piazza’s Reaction

Disappointingly incomplete. While I’ve had positive experiences with Amplio’s other games, unfortunately Dream Team is more like a Nightmare Scenario. Save your money and skip this experience. During our team’s play through, we encountered a game-breaking bug. Unable to progress at the time, we came back some time later and played through the remainder of this game, only to remark “that’s all that was left?” From the puzzles to its copy editing, the game felt underbaked.

Tammy McLeod’s Reaction

Having played previous offerings from Amplio, I came into Dream Team expecting a game-like experience followed by insightful analysis and actionable feedback, which is a structure I’ve enjoyed in the past. The concept here is strong, and the idea of using gameplay for team analysis is an appealing one.

That said, I found the user interface less intuitive than expected, and the pacing made it tricky to get fully engaged before each stage ended. The amount of game and puzzle content felt brief compared to the length and detail of the post-game report, which made the analysis feel somewhat disconnected from the experience.

On the technical side, we encountered a bug that required rescheduling our session, and some small polish issues such as typos. These didn’t prevent play entirely the second time around, but they did affect the overall impression.

With additional refinement to the game flow, clearer UI guidance, and more thorough quality assurance, I think Dream Team could fully deliver on its promising premise for its corporate customers.

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

The post Amplio – Dream Team [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• An online escape room in Gather

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level

Required Equipment: computer with an internet connection

Recommended Team Size: 2-4

Play Time: 45 minutes

Price: $150 per team

Booking: book online for a specific time slot

Description

Escape the Ancient Ruins is played in Gather, an online collaboration tool that plays like a video game. Players enter into voice/ video chat with their teammates, choose their avatar, and collaboratively solve puzzles using the Gather interface.

Matthew Stein’s Reaction

I spent a nontrivial amount of time during the pandemic in Gather, roaming around in various virtual escape rooms and immersive theater shows. A few years later, at a time when I can see my friends in person again with ease, it was enjoyable to revisit Gather and see that yes, it’s still a fairly novel and meaningful way to spatially hang out with friends from afar.

Raid the Room designed Escape the Ancient Ruins in a similar style to their previous Gather-based virtual escape room, Escape the Island. While both games are primarily targeted at a corporate audience, they run smoothly and take advantage of the unique features of Gather. The puzzles in Escape the Ancient Ruins were enjoyable, well clued, and varied, with a mix of wordplay, logic, and spatial communication.

While Escape the Ancient Ruins in many ways leveled up the “what” compared to its predecessor, implementing even more technically ambitious and interactive puzzles, I wished it had put a little more thought into the “why.” I don’t need every game to have a deep story, but a clearer objective, giving us a sense of purpose and connecting the scenes together, could have made Escape the Ancient Ruins more than just a random pile of fun puzzles.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• + Enjoyable puzzle variety
• + Great pixel-style graphics
• +/- Integration of instructions into the graphics makes them obvious but also makes the screen cluttered and less attractive
• + Some puzzle styles were adapted to work surprisingly well in this format (word puzzles, logic puzzles)
• + Several puzzles required coordinated teamwork to complete, using the medium well
• – Some “secret” control keys (like “ghost” mode) should be part of the introductory training, because they make the game more pleasant and are hard to discover on your own
• + It was entertaining to build a custom avatar or pick a premade one with special graphics
• + Being able to zoom in and out on the map was very helpful
• ? Story is minimal, with a primary focus on puzzles
• ? The planned competition mode, with cash prizes, might make the game more stressful and less fun, and will amplify any problems with controls or internet connections

Andrew Reynolds’ Reaction

Escape the Ancient Ruins was a series of five puzzles created and hosted in Gather, a collaboration platform. I missed out on playing Raid the Room’s first game back in 2022, so I was eager to get a chance to play their newest offering.

Escape the Ancient Ruins made learning how to interact in Gather very easy. That’s not the purpose of the game, but the first level was a word game that needed our team of three to know how to move, interact with the world, and communicate with each other. That set the stage for the next four levels, each centered around a different puzzle type but always increasing the need for communication and collaboration.

One puzzle style in the middle of the game felt like an odd choice at first, it being the kind of puzzle I don’t typically see as being collaborative. While it wasn’t as team oriented as the others in the set, it was one of the easier to digest forms of this particular puzzle type. We intentionally slowed down to discuss it, which was the right thing to do even though it likely stopped us from setting a record.

I wanted more out of this game narratively. There was no overarching story to tie the levels together. They were set on the same island but the whole game lacked any sort of set up to explain why our team was there and why we needed to escape. While the puzzles were enjoyable and our team really enjoyed solving together I would have liked to have seen at least an attempt at a basic story. This doesn’t take away from the puzzles themselves, though. The back half of Escape the Ancient Ruins truly needed us to work together, and it all felt very natural.

After we played, the developer told us that they plan on running this game as a competition, so be on the lookout for updates from Raid the Room about that!

Christina Rohlf’s Reaction

Editor’s Note: Christina wasn’t planning to review this game, but she happened to book it right around the time the REA group played. Bonus review!

When the targeted Facebook marketing ads told me that Escapopolis was hosting an online escape room competition with the potential for real prize money, how could I say no? I rounded up the rest of the Natural Crotchkeys and off we went to Escape the Ancient Ruins.

For the competition at Escapopolis, the game environment appeared to be able to host up to 20 groups at the same time. Our time started automatically once we entered the first level. NPCs in each level gave generic instructions for how to solve the puzzle in the level. There were 5 levels; we were not told how many levels there were at the start of the game. Supposedly, the top 10 fastest teams received cash prizes (1st $1000; 2nd $750; 3rd $500; 4th-10th $150); however, we were told that the prize amounts would be proportionally less if fewer than 200 teams registered to play. No hints were available during the competition.

Escape the Ancient Ruins was a series of 5 levels, each with a unique puzzle to solve. NPC characters in each level provided some direction for how to solve the puzzle at hand. In general, we enjoyed the puzzles. They were logical, clever, and did a fairly good job at keeping all four of us occupied. I absolutely loved the polymorph puzzle. However, we found the map interface for one puzzle frustrating, because there was no good way for the person at the map (who should have been directing the puzzle) to also see the location of the players. We also were disappointed that there was no leaderboard. While we were told our time at the end of our playthrough, the only follow up was a vague email indicating “the winners have been notified.” Since this was a competition, I would have liked to see how we stacked up to the other teams. In general, the Escape the Ancient Ruins competition was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon activity and a good excuse to get the band together to do some puzzling.

Disclosure: Raid the Room provided the first three Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.

The post Raid the Room – Escape the Ancient Ruins [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Print-and-play
• Tabletop escape game
• Includes video segments
• Escape room party kit

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level

Required Equipment:

• Computer with internet connection
• Printer
• Pen and paper
• Scissors
• Tape

Recommended Team Size: 1-4

Play Time:

• Prep times can take up to 3 hours (although it can be done in 90 minutes)
• Play time can range from 1 hour – 2.5 hours.

Price: ~ $24

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

Forsaken Souls: Cursed Artifact was a print-and-play escape room kit intended to be played as a full escape room throughout three different rooms of your home.

To set the game up, a gamemaster must cut out 23 pages of game materials, organize those pieces into 15 containers (anything they can find at home or tape together your own printable lockboxes), and affix a unique padlock image to each container. The gamemaster then hides these objects in three different rooms, though the specific hiding places are not prescribed by the game.

Players search one room at a time for clues and padlocked containers. When they solve a puzzle, they enter the solution into a QR-coded website and receive a 3-digit “key.” If that key matches a padlock, they open the associated container to receive more clues. (There is also an online hint system and occasional cutscene videos to watch.)

Be warned that the prep time is extensive. One person is the dedicated gamemaster who prepares everything in their home. However, they don’t know any puzzle solutions and can still participate in the fun.

Finally, it’s possible to play this game as a set of puzzles without hiding and then finding all the pieces. However, someone still must cut out and organize all the game pieces.

Forsaken Souls: Cursed Artifact successfully launched on Kickstarter in July 2025 and is now available on Etsy.

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

In this print-and-play game, you enter the gates of Finch Estate. Their heirloom seems to be missing. Can you figure out why and where it went?

At its best, the download files came with detailed instructions. Although you need to appoint one person as the gamemaster who prepares and runs the game, they can still help to solve the puzzles because they don’t know the solutions. There’s also a website with a smartly designed answer validation, a great hint system with multiple small nudges, and a couple of cute cutscene videos.

At its worst, the prep time was extensive. Even trying to be speedy, it still took me 1.5 hours before starting to play. Cutting out all the game components felt especially cumbersome. The story had an interesting approach but failed to captivate me, as puzzles rarely had a connection to the theme. The first riddle felt misleading and led to a rocky onramp. Ultimately, the game was too linear to justify keeping up to 6 players occupied.

There’s clearly a lot of passion that went into creating this project. Make sure you have some time to prepare, the printed pages and scissors, and a smaller group and you’ll have a great time.

The Lone Puzzler’s Reaction

Significant (1 hour or more) time to cut and prepare game. Game had elegant “props” and worked very well, but very short and relatively simple puzzles. Best use might be for a party game, but it was a bit of a letdown after the set-up. The puzzles had some fairly intricate pieces and lead-in, but while clever in general, they would be a short solve for most players. Simple home box escape games are more engaging without the cutting. However, the price and ability to access online might be appealing to some players. I would prefer to have a more tangible set of play items than flimsy printer paper. Also, moderate fear of losing a piece out of the 100+ that were cut out.

Sarah Mendez’s Reaction

If someone handed me Forsaken Souls: Cursed Artifact in a ready-to-play format, I’d be happy with the experience. Its 1-2 hour play time was full of entertaining puzzles and a compelling enough story, substantially more content than most escape room kits offer. It was a solid puzzling game that I enjoyed. However, as a print-and-play make-your-own escape room, it also required more than an hour of cutting and organizing materials, prompting some cost/ benefit analysis.

The success of this game as an in-home escape room hinges on how well you can calibrate your environment for interesting yet reasonable searching, a difficult task that plagues most escape room kits. In this case, searching for game pieces seemed like the only enhancement in playing the game as an escape room rather than as a tabletop game. The puzzles did not use the physical space in a meaningful way, the game pieces weren’t recognizable objects that promoted a sense of place on their own, and the setting of “the Finch Estate” wasn’t evocative enough to inspire extra decorative efforts.

For me, then, I wished this game had been presented more as a tabletop game with pre-packaged materials, allowing me to focus on its strengths. That said, if someone offers to host this game for you, go for it… and maybe bring some cookies. Your host deserves some thanks.

Disclosure: Forsaken Souls provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.

The post Forsaken Souls: Cursed Artifact [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play: tabletop escape game

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level
• Art nerds

Required Equipment: pen & paper, scissors

Recommended Team Size: 1-2

Play Time: about 75-90 minutes

Price: about $18

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

We had been summoned to track down a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh by following clues through the city of Amsterdam. The game presented us with riddle cards to focus our attention on a series of fold-out locations, each with its own puzzle. By entering our discoveries into a decoder wheel, we progressed to new riddle cards and paper fold-outs, roughly simulating an exploration of the city.

Cindi S’ Reaction

The Hunt Through Amsterdam began at the Vincent Van Gogh Museum and brought us through the streets and canals of the famous city to find a missing painting, rumored to be by the artist himself. What a find that would be! The references to real places in Amsterdam added authenticity to this Exit:The Game experience. Illustrations on story booklets looked like oil paintings, with muted colors and textured brushstrokes. Though very nice to look at, they weren’t used much in puzzling. Overall the game was fun, and at a level of 3 out of 5 difficulty, it flowed smoothly with mostly straightforward solves. We did get tripped up on one puzzle, which could be solved in more than one way. The mechanics of the final puzzle worked well, bringing the adventure to a close. Amsterdam is central to some of my favorite escape rooms, and playing this Exit: The Game installment made me want to plan my next trip!

Theresa W’s Reaction

Exit: The Game’s The Hunt Through Amsterdam followed a very similar formula to the Exit: The Game installments we’re familiar with, with some solid puzzling and appealing artwork. Word on the street was that there was an undiscovered Van Gogh piece, and we were on the hunt to find it! The puzzles were cute and thematic, based on actual locations I’ve visited in Amsterdam! Each puzzle felt at-home in the story and setting. One late-game puzzle in particular was under-clued and clunky compared to how seamlessly the rest of the game played. If this theme is up your alley, check out The Hunt Through Amsterdam!

Sarah Mendez’s Reaction

The Hunt Through Amsterdam was a fine enough Exit: The Game installment that delivered a reasonable set of puzzles but lacked highs and lows. The activities were solid, the construction aspects were approachable, and yet there was that one task that seemed needlessly tedious without adding much to its puzzle. I struggle to find much else to comment on, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At this point, I think Exit: The Game delivers experiences that are consistent with their box’s “level,” and The Hunt through Amsterdam lived up to those expectations without exceeding them.

Notable aspects of this installment:

• Amsterdam allusions
• Less box manipulation than usual

Disclosure: Exit: The Game provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.

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The post Exit the Game – The Hunt Through Amsterdam [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

This craze really kicked off during the pandemic, when Wordle went viral… and subsequently inspired more puzzle games.

Most of these games are free, although some of them show ads on the screen. (Edit: Since publication most of the New York Times games have moved behind a paywall.)

Every contributor at REA has different favorites. Here’s a guide to the puzzle games we love most.

We’ve reviewed the independently hosted games first, and then the collections by the Atlantic, LinkedIn, the New York Times, and Puzzmo.

If you have a favorite daily puzzle game that isn’t listed here, please leave a comment.

Table of Contents

If you like words:

• Bracket City (Atlantic)
• Crossclimb (LinkedIn)
• Dead Letters
• Fluxis (Atlantic)
• Letroso
• Pinpoint (LinkedIn)
• Raddle
• SpellTower (Puzzmo)
• Squeezy
• Stacks (Atlantic)
• Strands (NYT)
• Typeshift (Puzzmo)
• Wordle (NYT)

If you like logic, deduction, and spatial games:

• Bongo (Puzzmo)
• Clue Raider
• Clues by Sam
• Connections (NYT)
• Flipart (Puzzmo)
• Mazele
• Memoku (Puzzmo)
• Pile-Up Poker (Puzzmo)
• Pips (NYT)
• Queens (LinkedIn)
• Really Bad Chess (Puzzmo)
• Sudoku (LinkedIn)
• Tango (LinkedIn)
• Zip (LinkedIn)

If you want to test your knowledge about specific subjects:

• Cinematrix and Telematrix
• Metazooa
• Thrice
• Tradle
• Worldle

Games

Cinematrix and Telematrix

By Sarah Willson

Cinematrix and Telematrix: Can you think of a Nicole Kidman movie that won an Academy Award? How about a movie starring Idris Elba that’s one or two words long? If the answer is “yes, and that was fun,” Cinematrix may be for you. In Vulture’s daily Cinematrix, the object is to fill in nine movies that fit the criteria provided by the grid. Often multiple movies will fit a given square, so a big part of the puzzle is placing the ones you know strategically to fill as much of the grid as possible. Serious movie buffs can think up the most obscure movies for a higher score, but it’s fun to rack your brain for suitable guesses even if you’re just a casual moviegoer. A new Cinematrix comes out every day, and there’s also a TV version, Telematrix, released on Mondays and Thursdays.

Clue Raider

By Chuck Kaplan-Smith

Clue Raider takes the standard logic puzzle formula to a curious, challenging, and addictive place by adding spatial and environmental considerations. A mix of Clues by Sam (see below) and Sudoku, Clue Raider has players using limited information to place characters in a 7×7 grid—but once you place an object, no other object can go in the same column or row. Adding in the use of several Egyptian props to either restrict options or complicate the decision space makes logic puzzles a little more interesting than the traditional text grids of yore. This is the Lost Relic puzzle format, though the more themeless Mosaic puzzle scratches the same itch on a more abstract way. This is definitely a worthy game. The fact that a week’s backlog of puzzles (plus a cache of 25 bonus puzzles) is available will have this game raiding your free time.

Clues by Sam

By Sarah Willson

Clues by Sam is a game of deduction: By uncovering clues from a grid of 20 little emoji people, you gradually reveal which of them are criminals and which are innocent. It’s fairly simple to learn (once you internalize what “neighbor” means), but the clues have enough variation from day to day that the puzzles feel fresh. Another delightful bit is the mini stories and quips woven through the dialogue of the characters without clues to offer. It’s a chance to see the designer’s personal touches, whether the suspects are tracking down a bicycle thief or celebrating Sam’s mother’s birthday.

Dead Letters

By Chuck Kaplan-Smith

The concept of Dead Letters sounds like if Stephen King turned Boggle into a web game. This Reddit-based game presents you with a 3×3 grid of letters for you to turn into a word up to 9 letters… but if you don’t use one, it eventually will die! Now your maximum word length is 8, and a gravestone serves as a stark reminder of the ephemeral nature of being (and that you have to use your letters in 4 turns or less). Each turn you don’t use a letter, its point value diminishes. The game offers surprising depth, as you are forced to consider optimizing points from newer letters versus ensuring letters don’t die. It’s accessible enough for casual play, but there’s a deep challenge beneath the surface. Sometimes, I like to stick to the classics like Wordle and Spelling Bee, but—to allude to King—sometimes Dead is better.

Letroso

By Andrew Reynolds

The simplest way to explain Letroso is that it plays like Wordle but with fewer constraints. The rules are basically the same: you guess a word, and each letter is color coded based on whether it appears in the target word and where it appears. Unlike Wordle, though, the target word can be up to 10 letters long, and you have unlimited guesses. Letroso provides a daily game as well as an unlimited mode where a random word is chosen as the target word. As a longtime daily Wordle player, I appreciate Letroso’s twist on the format. I find that it works well as a group game, as the varied word size leads to multiple word possibilities and letter patterns to consider. Having a few people taking a look at it helps with brainstorming. And the unlimited play mode means that you get to keep playing beyond just one puzzle.

Mazele

By Sarah Willson

Here’s another one for the logic fiends. The objective of Mazele is to deduce a path from the left edge of the grid to the right. Similar to Wordle, Mazele uses color to indicate when you have the correct placement of squares in a row or column (green) or at least the correct number of squares (yellow). The difficulty can vary depending on your initial guess as well as the complexity of that day’s path: Some days you guess the maze in two quick turns, but I’ve also had mazes confound me for close to 20 minutes. Honestly, the difficult ones are the most satisfying, especially when you go from very little color to that perfect wall of green.

Metazooa

By Sarah Willson

Metazooa by Trainwreck Labs challenges you to deduce each day’s mystery animal by tracking it across the animal kingdom’s family tree. Each animal you guess will bring you one step closer to the target animal, and 20 guesses is usually more than enough to zero in on the answer, especially once you start getting familiar with the taxonomy. Wikipedia previews of the taxonomic branches give more information to guess by—at least most of the time. Insects and fish can be punishing. But most days it’s a fun, quick guessing game, worth playing for all the animal facts you can learn along the way.

Raddle

by Scott Olson

Sandy Weisz is one of the most elegant puzzle designers out there and his daily puzzle Raddle is a bite sized delight. Knowing the themed starting and ending word (Dancing to Queen is one of my favorites), players must determine the next entry in the thirteen-word sequence given the word length and a set of out-of-order clues. The ladder can be solved up or down, with hints available on the clue or the answer if you are stuck on a rung. Sandy’s entertaining blend of trivia and wordplay is what makes Raddle a winner, and I don’t even like wordplay. References are far and wide (recently Chappell Roan, pad thai, and Airplane! all made appearances), but never too deep, making the puzzles accessible for all. While occasionally an answer may have multiple solutions that fit, leading to a futile search for a different clue, this experience is rare with most rungs solving cleanly. It will not be uncommon that you’ll think “what do I associate with that word” and sure enough, you’ll see a clue that makes you proud that puzzle designer brains aren’t that different from you and me.

If you are interested in learning more about Sandy’s game design philosophy, check out our REPOD interview with him where he talks about designing for elegance. 

Squeezy

By Brett Kuehner

Squeezy is a quick word puzzle game where you insert tiles with one or more letters into words to make new words. I’ve been playing it every night before going to sleep, and it takes only a couple of minutes. Difficulty level ranges from easy to medium, and there are hints available if needed. There are no ads, which is very nice.

You are presented with somewhere between 3 and 8 words, and a corresponding number of tiles. Since there are multiple words and multiple tiles, you need to figure out which tile goes in each word, as well as where in the word it goes. For example, if you have a tile with the letter “R”, you could insert it into “TUCK” to make “TRUCK”. To aid in that, the inserted tiles (in order of the word list) will then spell out a new word. Sometimes a tile could fit in several words, but there is only one solution where all the tiles form new words and spell out a new word in order.

There are three rounds, and the words spelled by the inserted tiles in each round will all be related in some way, like “My Little Pony characters” or “Words containing numbers”. Some of the relationships between words are very tenuous and unguessable, at least for me, but I don’t really consider them part of the puzzle. They are more of a “guess what the constructor was thinking” game.

The graphic design is simple and appealing, and the mechanics take seconds to learn. The interaction design could be a little better- instead of doing the obvious “drag tiles into position,” you have to click on a tile and then click where you want to place it. Sometimes the clicking ends up selecting some of the text instead, and you have to tap again to clear it. Minor, but still a bit annoying.

There are two other modes: “Easy Squeezy,” where there is only one round, and if you want a harder challenge, there is “Wheezy” mode which adds extra tiles that are unused.

The same company offers a variety of other daily puzzles, but they are more common types and don’t appeal to me as much as Squeezy.

Thrice

By Chuck Kaplan-Smith

Perfect for pub quiz fiends, Thrice gives you the snark, wit, and irreverence that one would expect from Geeks Who Drink live event. What sets Thrice apart from other trivia games is its progressive hint system. Across five categories, you’ll be prompted for an answer once, twice, or thrice (insert a GIF of Leonard DiCaprio pointing at the TV here)–each subsequent hint providing a different and more accessible entry point to the answer, though with a lower point value. Thrice scratches that trivia night itch and saves you the social pressure of buying a burger and a beer.

Worldle

By Emily Hall

Worldle (note the extra “L”!) is a geography-based daily puzzle game. It shows the outline of a country. You make a guess and then it tells you how far you are from the right country and in what direction. You have a max of six guesses. The added challenge is that scale isn’t represented: Sure you might recognize Lesotho in context as a small country surrounded by South Africa. But when that outline is 1) alone and 2) the same size as the outline of Mongolia, you are probably going to need some direction-based hints. My biggest complaint is that even though it is billed as a “daily puzzle” there are days when the puzzle is blank with no indication of when things will resume. Additionally there are only so many countries in the world, so repeats are expected. But for those who enjoy a daily dose of geography, Worldle is a nice departure from word-based games.

Tradle

By David Spira

Who here has a casual love of macro-economics!?

My absolute favorite daily puzzle asks you to look at a visualization of a single country’s exports and the total dollar amount of those exports annualized.

By looking at the dollar amount of the exports, I can get a sense of how big the country’s economy is, and then past that I’ll start toggling my way through the visualization and look for clues:

• What are the main exports? Do I already know where those tend to come from?
• Are there extractive exports like petroleum or mined materials?
• Maybe there are industries that imply a coastline like fishing ?
• Perhaps there are tropical fruits showing up?
• Am I looking at exports that demand complex process?

At some point I just have to take a best guess, and then after that the game literally turns into Worldle (minus the outline of the country).

I adore Tradle. It sits right at the intersection of so many things that I love… although occasionally it will wreck me by making me figure out a very small island nation in the South Pacific that I’ve only notionally heard of… but even that is interesting.

I know that this really isn’t for everyone but if you’re still reading this passage, then maybe this one is for you?

Collections

The Atlantic Games

By Peih Gee Law

The Atlantic Games are a new addition to the buffet of daily puzzle games. Each game is snack-sized, including the crossword puzzle. But don’t be fooled, they’re deceptively challenging. What I enjoyed most about The Atlantic Games is the way they dare the players to think creatively and a little bit outside the box.

Crossword
This is familiar territory. A mini-crossword puzzle that increases in difficulty as we progress in the week.

Bracket City
At first glance, this looks like a very strange paragraph. That’s because we’re given a daily historical fact that’s had its insides scooped out and replaced with nested clues. It plays a bit like a crossword puzzle, except your answers form part of another clue. It’s weird, but strangely satisfying.

Fluxis
In a way, Fluxis challenges the player to become a puzzle creator. You must link words by forming a chain where the next word starts with the end letters of the previous word. The catch is, each clue must satisfy a certain stipulations. I find this game difficult, but extremely satisfying when I’m able to connect the circuit.

Stacks
Stacks is a little bit like if Tetris and Scrabble had a baby. You drop words stacking up on each other, but letters will fall through gaps onto words below. It’s solved when you’ve formed new words in each line. Also the little graphic of the word being pulled via pulley is adorable.

LinkedIn Games

by Tammy McLeod

LinkedIn has 6 daily puzzle games, Zip, Tango, Queens, Pinpoint, Crossclimb, and the newly released daily Sudoku.

When you complete a puzzle, it shows “Today’s average” so you can compare yourself to the rest of LinkedIn. You are also shown your quartile position among your connections. It’s a gently competitive system, and though they encourage you to share your result, I am reluctant to spam my professional network with 5 daily posts about my puzzle prowess. I do enjoy spending a few minutes each day completing the games, and it’s nice to see my stats accumulate.

As for the games themselves, Zip, Tango, and Queens are visual/ spatial logic games, and Pinpoint and Crossclimb and word games. Sometimes I’m more in the mood for one type over the other, but I hate to break my streak, so I continue to play them all.

Zip involves drawing a continuous path through a grid that connects numbered squares in order. It is a nice little test of spatial logic, usually taking under a minute. Your score is your final time, though they also show you how many times you needed to backtrack your path, which I try to ignore, since it doesn’t seem to be tracked.

Tango bears similarities to the well-known Tic Tac Logic. You have to fill a grid with suns and moons, with no more than 3 of any symbol in a row. There is always a way of solving it without guessing, which is nice, though sometimes I get stuck for a while finding the next move.

For Queens, you have to place 8 crowns in a grid, one in each colored region, column, and row, with none touching. This one challenges me the most, because of irregular regions. My mind tends to prefer straight lines and blocks only. Your mileage may vary.

A strong vocabulary benefits Pinpoint players where you have to guess the category as 5 words are revealed one by one. I usually aim to match the average. The system is pretty good at interpreting whether your guess is correct, and I haven’t had any issues with it.

Crossclimb is a word ladder with a twist. You need to solve clues for the words, arrange the words so that they change one letter in order, then guess the first and last words. It’s a rapid fire word puzzle, that I find hard work for something so small!

The newly released daily Sudoku puzzle is written by Thomas Snyder, also known as Dr. Sudoku, who is a former champion and published puzzle author. It uses the well known Sudoku rules, but is a mini version, only utilizing the numbers 1-6, and much quicker than a full puzzle. The puzzles that have been released so far are challenging despite the smaller size, and are a worthy addition to the daily gauntlet.

The New York Times Games

by Tammy McLeod

The New York Times Games section has a number of puzzle games, but 3 word games, in particular, stand out for their use of results sharing. Finishing each of those 3 daily puzzles provides the player with the ability to copy and paste their results in emoji form for sharing with others. I am in multiple chat groups where far-flung friends I might normally speak to only once or twice a year, share their daily results. It’s a surprising albeit brief moment of connection, but I am so grateful that it exists. The act of sharing one’s results is socially more active than a passive leaderboard, and I celebrate it!

The first game is Wordle, which is a word guessing game that took the world by storm in 2021. The concept is simple. The player has 6 tries to guess a 5-letter word. After each attempt, the game marks a letter green if it is correct, or marks it yellow if it is in the answer, but in the wrong position. If the word is guessed successfully, the player can click to copy a series of colored square emoji, showing the success of their guesses.

Wordle 1,480 5/6*

Note the all-important presence of the asterisk after my score, which indicates that I play on Hard Mode, where any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. I am required to include the green and yellow letters that I have. Wordle understands the importance of calling out their players’ effort!

Connections is an association game. 16 words or phrases are shown scrambled and the player has to sort them into 4 themed groups, by selecting 4 at a time and submitting their guess. The groups have a difficulty ranking associated with them, with yellow being the easiest, and purple being the hardest, and a group’s color is revealed on each successful guess. One of the statistics that the system tracks is how often purple is the first group guessed, so I often try to sort out all 4 groups in my head before submitting any guesses. There are usually words from different groups that look like they belong together, so it can be tricky. It doesn’t help that occasionally, groups are things like “Words that end in something that sounds like a body part.” The player is allowed 4 mistakes before losing the game. Some days, the chat groups bond over the trickiness of the purple category. Misery loves company. On other days, we celebrate each others’ success. The daily puzzles have become an unlikely catalyst for building human connection.

Connections
Puzzle #758

In Strands, the player is given a 6×8 grid of letters that can be broken down into strands of words. The title is a clue to the theme, which is hidden as a “Spangram,” a strand that goes from one side of the grid to the other. The remaining words belong to that theme. Players draw strands to guess the words one at a time, and there is no guess limit. Guessing 3 non-theme but real words earns a hint that shows the letters of one of the theme words. Sharing one’s results shows when hints were taken and when the spangram was found.

Strands #492
“So extra”

Unlike the other NYT offerings, the newly released daily game Pips is purely number-based and no vocabulary is necessary. Given a layout with various rules drawn on it, the player has to rotate and place all the provided dominoes to satisfy all the requirements. At times the interface feels a bit awkward, so I end up spending more time shifting dominoes than working through the logic. Even so, I really value the variety of having a logic puzzle alongside the word games.

I look forward to playing these games each day, sometimes even staying up till midnight for them to reset. Living on the West Coast, I envy my East Coast friends who gain access to each new day of puzzles 3 hours earlier than I do. But most importantly, I keep coming back, because more than just showing off puzzling prowess, at least once a day, no matter where in the world we are, we are all facing that same puzzle together.

Puzzmo

By Matthew Stein

Since the platform’s launch in October 2023, Puzzmo has become a key part of my daily puzzle-solving ritual. Their lineup of a dozen-some word and logic games is playful, thoughtfully curated, and instantly addictive.

At the center of it all, Puzzmo’s midi-sized crosswords are a breath of fresh air, featuring a diverse cast of designers, modern cluing, an integrated hint system, and a willingness to bend the rules. Other games put more of a twist on the classics: Memoku is a cross between Sudoku and Concentration, Really Bad Chess challenges you to checkmate your opponent… with completely random pieces in all the wrong places, and SpellTower is what you might get if Boggle and Tetris had a child. One of my personal favorites is Flipart, a sort of interactive Mondrian painting where you rotate colorful pieces to fully cover a rectangle. It can be mindless, or you can try to complete a “perfect speedrun” without any extra moves (my current record is 134.) Some of Puzzmo’s most interesting designs involve surprising levels of strategy, as is the case with Pile-Up Poker and one of their newest releases, Bongo. And I’d be remiss not to mention Typeshift, which might be considered the answer to: “what if I just spin the dials on this combo lock and found a set of words that used every letter at least once?” (Naughty behavior in an escape room, but a path to glory on Puzzmo!)

Puzzmo is pulsing with innovation; they’re constantly experimenting with new games and iterating on their existing ones, and they’ve even published a physical book. If you’re looking for bite-sized brain candy that’s approachable yet engaging, with robust support for public and private leaderboards, Puzzmo is the platform for you.

We can’t forget…

The New York Times Crossword puzzle may be the most well-respected daily puzzle game, played by over 2 million people monthly. Will Shortz, the editor of The New York Times Crossword puzzle joined David and Peih-Gee on REPOD to talk about how crosswords have evolved to reflect pop culture, the impact of mini puzzles, and why wordplay connects people in ways you might not expect.

PG’s Playhouse

If you love wordplay, you’ll enjoy our newest podcast, PG’s Playhouse co-hosted by Peih-Gee Law and David Spira. Each episode features a guest, a theme, a set of puzzles, and a discussion pulling all of these things together.

Conclusion

We are loving this trend of daily games, both for the puzzles and for the bite-sized socializing it facilitates. We hope you find a favorite game or two among this list and join us for our daily puzzle ritual.

About the Comments on this Guide

We do not necessarily endorse all the games in the comments on this post, so explore those games at your own risk.

We are playing through them as our writers have time and inclination to do so. We are also receiving a lot of suggestions by email. If we find some we really love in the games in the comments or our email, we’ll add them above as full recommendations.

For the time being, we do not recommend Doodle5, anoun, or 5Qs. With these games, we found that the use of AI for puzzle generation and/ or clues created red herrings and feedback that didn’t meaningfully aid in the puzzle-solving experience. Additionally, answers were often rejected for simply being pluralized or singularized, despite the answer and intent being obvious. With a little more consideration of the player experience, these games could be worth recommending, but when we played, these games lacked the intentionality and thoughtful design that we look for. (By Chuck Kaplan-Smith)

Additionally, we do not recommend Griductive, which emulates the look and feel of Clues by Sam without the personality or humor. While Griductive does boast a variety of grid sizes for alleged difficulty, the clues at each board size (ranging from 3×3 to 5×5) are fundamentally identical. The challenge is merely in the quantity of clues and not their wording. Additionally, in its effort to copy Clues by Sam, it misses one of the key design features: Characters in Clues by Sam are ordered alphabetically, making it easy to find a named character; by contrast, Griductive’s characters are randomly arranged, which makes finding any character in the larger grids tedious. It comes across as something that was procedurally generated, not hand-crafted with heart and wit. (By Chuck Kaplan-Smith)

CoffeeFirst.games is a collection of short (mostly) daily games. Only one of those games is unique, however, which is the chess-based Royal Family. It’s a fun game, somewhat similar to LinkedIn’s Queens game, but with a nicer interface and more interesting. Since the rest of the games aren’t unique, we don’t especially recommend this platform unless you like having a group of standard puzzles in one spot. (By Jacky Chang)

The post Daily Puzzle Game Recommendations Guide appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Format

Style of Play:

• Point-and-click

Who is it For?

• Any experience level
• Puzzle lovers

Required Equipment: mobile device

Recommended Team Size: 1

Play Time: 2 hours

Price: free

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

This is a point-and-click game that players can download from the app store. The game is not as large in content as Rusty Lakes’ paid games. However, it’s a lovely celebration of 10 years of their company. And it’s free to play.

Matthew Stein’s Reaction

For their 10-year anniversary, Rusty Lake created a brand new game paying tribute to their intricately intertwined canon of mobile games and to the incredible fanbase that they’ve cultivated over the years. The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show was a delight from start to finish, brimming with passion and well-earned pride. While not as extensive as a normal Rusty Lake game, it offered tremendous value for a free offering.

If you’ve played enough of Rusty Lake’s previous creations, you’ll recognize a high density of familiar characters and references, though no outside context was actually required to work through the core gameplay. Many elements were familiar: intuitive point-and-click interactions, surreal and macabre imagery, and a lovely soundtrack. For those who want to dive deeper, a set of playing card-themed achievements served as a de facto tour of many of the game’s Easter eggs (and the physical deck of matching cards are available for purchase for a limited time!)

But what impressed me most about The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show was its focus on the people behind the games. There was more to the game than initially met the eye, and they found a clever way to honor the Rusty Lake development team. I enjoyed sorting through an in-game archive that even included references to some of my favorite IRL Dutch escape rooms. Furthermore, the winning entry of a fan art contest featured prominently in the game, and I recommend checking out all the phenomenal finalists on Rusty Lake’s Instagram.

Congrats to Rusty Lake on a decade of innovation!

Theresa W’s Reaction

The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show is such a cute game to celebrate 10 years of Rusty Lake! With an adorably weird premise and equally as quirky gameplay, Rusty Lake allowed the players to celebrate with them through the 10 years. There are so many little tributes to their previous games scattered throughout that will bring fans so much joy. My only gripe with this game was the beginning: the puzzles felt Rusty Lake-esque, but were much more on the easy side and didn’t push the gameplay boundaries as much as I would have expected. They were still enjoyable, just not weird enough. I would definitely not recommend playing this as your first Rusty Lake game. Give any of the others (or even better, a few!) a go first before hopping into The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show!

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

A sleight of hand and some unexpected reveals: With The Mr. Rabbits Magic Show the developers of Rusty Lake celebrate a decade full of mysterious point-and-click adventures.

At its best, the story surrounding the gameplay was straightforward and (unlike some of its predecessors) never weird just for the sake of being strange. There was a decent variety of puzzles in general but they truly shined when the environment got on a meta level. A couple of inside jokes made for the perfect way to celebrate 10 years of their company. On top of that, this game comes at the great price of free.

At its worst, the gameplay was on the shorter side and obviously not as expansive as some of the full-length Rusty Lake products. Its structure became somewhat repetitive. Therefore the story didn’t pull me in as much as I hoped for. Although the challenges all made sense, they were with very few expectations all on the easier side. Finally, one item glitched and made me restart a certain chapter.

There’s nothing to lose by playing this. Have fun celebrating a huge milestone of a beloved and creative gaming universe.

The post Rusty Lake – The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show [Hivemind Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.