Systems: Windows, Oculus Rift, HTC Valve, Nintendo Switch
Original Release Date: May 10, 2018
Publisher: OnSkull Development
First, a couple points on the context before we get started.
Conklederp and I first played Escape First 3 because that was what I had purchased, thinking that it was the third game in this series meant that it would be of better quality, and it also had escape rooms that interested us more than the brief description given for this first game. Second, Conklederp and I have played a number of in-person escape rooms, primarily with our friends Himo and Folly. I am not 100% sure what our track record is, but I know it is well over 50% as there have only been two escape rooms that we have failed to complete. But that is not this article. This article is about Escape First, a video game adaptation of escape rooms originally designed for VR and ported over to the Switch in February 2020. So we are fairly experienced in this physical arena and were hoping that what we were about to play would be similar enough to in-person escape rooms that we would have fun.
I should also mention that my review of the game will, to the best of my ability, not include (m)any spoilers or solutions on how to solve any of the puzzles. There may be inadvertent hints in the pictures, but that may only be obvious once you are in the game and already know the solution.
Escape First is made up of three individual escape rooms with their own setting and theme where you have to solve a series of puzzles within a set amount of time so that you can escape. There is no death, no enemies running at you while you try and punch in a 16 digit sequence in fewer than 10 seconds. Just you in a room with puzzles to solve. You start out the game in some sort of lobby, like you passed through the front door of business which also happens to look out on some beautiful high desert scenery. You are given the choice of your three rooms by title, "Psycho Circus," "The Red Button," and "Lost in Time."
To us, the puzzles in these games were organized in a way that once you solved one puzzle, it leads you to the next puzzle with maybe some clue to a future puzzle that you needed more pieces to solve. Normally we do not like escape rooms where only one thing can be solved at a time because that tends to mean that there are people with nothing to do or you have too many people trying to solve the same thing. Having this set-up in a video game setting works well because there was only one screen and one controller. While in each room, you can receive hints on the puzzle you are currently working on, and a 5-minute timer before you can receive another hint. Each of the rooms in this game had a 45-minute timer, which we only felt pressured on one puzzle while solving the last puzzle. I did tinker with the controls a bit, inverting the y-axis (because for whatever reason you were unable to in Escape First 3) and Conklederp and I dove right in.
"Psycho Circus"
This room was pure escape room. You started out in one room with all of the puzzles surrounding you, keypads on drawers, and drawings/symbols on those drawers hinting at what clues you needed to punch into the keypad to open a new drawer or locked door. Everything was pretty straightforward, although, with one puzzle, Conklederp and I did overthink the clues which forced us to use the hint system. We realized that we were taking too many clues into account to determine the keypad code and we really only needed the clue that we had found. Pretty common for us in physical escape rooms too. There was one puzzle that we could not understand the clue to and were able to solve the puzzle by process of elimination. There were also a couple red herrings in the room that had no relation to any of the puzzles, which was nice. One very cool thing with this room was the background sound that played during the puzzle. There was the ambient sound of the circus happening outside of the room as well as various attempts to unnerve the player, which were frequently effective.
"The Red Button"
This room was mostly fun, although there were some issues with the clues given and how the developers expect the player to solve puzzles based off of the clues given. I feel like in physical escape rooms, there should be the position taken by the people who develop puzzles, that the puzzles have to be solved only with information that is given to the players. No player should need outside information that they bring in with them, not given to them, in order to solve any puzzle. If there is a clue that mentions a
Denver Omelet, as an escape room designer, you should not expect players to know the ingredients and how to make one. In "The Red Button" there was an instance similar to the Denver Omelet where the clue referenced something that might be considered common knowledge. This was a puzzle that I used the hint for, and it said something vague like, "Take the first two numbers from the letter and add the number of ingredients in [clue]." After this, we looked up the solution online because we still were not getting anywhere. There was another puzzle that referenced a clue from a previous room that we came through, but the door leading back to the room where the clue was became locked so we could not access what the in-game hint was referencing and we had to wait another 5 minutes to get another clue, which did end up giving us the answer.
While I loved the setting and a number of the puzzles in this particular room, I was not as compelled by the story and it felt like there was too much that did not make a lot of sense. While I am all for telling a story for why you find yourself in a room where everything is locked behind puzzles and there is some misdirection in some of the facts, I still want to feel that there is some logic behind the story going on.
"Lost in Time"
The last room in this game was probably the strangest. There were still puzzles you solved to unlock locked cabinets and chests, but this room diverged in that instead of keypads you were entering numbers into, here you were entering time on various clocks. In this room, I felt that we did our best in terms of being able to decipher clues and solve puzzles. We did end up using the hint system once towards the end, but it felt more like we were confirming one of two theories we had on how to proceed because at that point we had around only 10 minutes left. We did eat up a fair amount of time following clues to the wrong conclusion, but that is one of the best things about playing escape rooms with people is that you have other avenues of thinking besides your own, especially if you get stuck in a rut.
You know, overall this was a pretty decent collection of escape rooms that we had fewer issues with than Escape First 3 (more on that in the Escape First 3 article next week). I did not experience any glitches or bugs that made the game unplayable or the puzzles unsolvable, so major kudos to OnSkull Games for a great port. I guess an appropriate way of signing off would be to say that for less than $5 (for a selection of three escape rooms), Conklederp and I were both very happy with Escape First, so much so that we got Escape First 2. You could probably play through all three escape rooms in a single sitting, but for us, in whatever wave of the pandemic, we are currently in with a lot of places going (back) into wearing masks all the time out in public, having an escape room to look forward to after getting Goblino to bed does make for a pretty great night in.
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