Escape Tales: The Awakening Review

I’ve completed 21 physical escape rooms so far, so it’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a fan. There’s something immensely satisfying about being locked up somewhere for an hour and having to use your wits to get out, but that might say more about my state of mind than anything else. Regardless, finding out that Bluekey Games was going to be digitising the card-based escape room Escape Tales: The Awakening was very exciting. They demonstrate impressive skill in the arena, as shown by their success with Rooms of Realities, a highly engaging series of VR escape experiences. However, Escape Tales is a third-party IP — so does the card-based format impose limits on the experience?

It’s worth acknowledging that the story underpinning most escape rooms is usually mediocre. There will be a theme which is paid the barest of lip service, along with some convoluted reason why you only have one hour to get out. Escape Tales ignores the time limit and fleshes out the story to make it more of an interactive novel, and both of these decisions work in its favour.

Sammy watched his wife Jen die. Now, his daughter Lizzie is in a coma caused by some mysterious ailment, so it’s fair to say the guy isn’t having the best time. But when a stranger gives him a book and tells him that Lizzie can be saved by performing a ritual, Sammy does so and is thrust into a room which he needs to… well, escape from. And save his kid, obviously. 

Each of the rooms you enter has a similar top-down layout, broken up into twelve explorable squares. Points of interest in a room are colour coded in three ways: unexplored areas are yellow, explored areas which have a puzzle to solve are blue, and fully explored areas are coloured grey. An area might have puzzles to solve or items to find. Others provide flavour text. Exploring an area costs a stamina point, and if you run out of stamina, you can recover them by meditating. However, too much meditation could affect the game’s ending; it sometimes comes at the cost of an item in your possession, and the game is not upfront about the importance of the items you discover. 

The biggest problem is that you have no idea which areas are significant when you enter a location, yet each uses up stamina to investigate it. You sometimes receive stamina from certain areas in a room by utilising less important items in your possession (for instance, a toilet plunger in one room can be used in a toilet in a subsequent room for bonus stamina), but again, this is trial and error. The only way to purposefully get through the game without sacrifice is to first complete the game and note the steps along the way so you can proceed at the most efficient pace. 

This is, by all accounts, a deliberate design choice. There are supposedly nine possible endings (I discovered at least five on multiple playthroughs), depending on how many items you manage to hold onto by the very end and which choices you make to get there. The game is geared toward replayability, which would be fine if the puzzle solutions changed — The Past Within, for instance, offered a novel way of altering puzzle solutions for subsequent attempts. But Escape Tales is more like an actual escape room; once you know the answer, the challenge is no longer there. On a second playthrough, I did make some different choices and found at least one new location, but the majority of the game experience was identical.

The puzzles are varied, though, including a combination of maths, observation, and visual trickery. In most cases, puzzles are formed by collecting a number of cards from around the room. Once you’ve collected all of the cards for a specific puzzle, you can then attempt to solve it. There are no penalties for getting it wrong, and there’s a hint system that dishes up clues before giving you the chance to just solve it and move on. There are plenty of standard teasers like “connecting the pipes” which have been done to death, but a few innovative ones including overlaying cards to form numbers, or follow paths. Some cards can be rotated or flipped too — it’s a shame that more wasn’t made of these mechanics as they really shake up the otherwise Professor Layton-esque feel. When compared to the ingenuity of Boxes: Lost Fragments, it seems almost pedestrian.

The interface gives you plenty of tools to help crack the puzzles, including three different coloured highlighters, a notes section and the ability to adjust the size of the puzzle cards to inspect them in greater detail. When you’ve solved the main puzzles in a location, a portal will appear to allow you to move on to the next. This will prevent you from returning, though, and you will potentially miss out on elements of the story or additional items which may come in handy later.

While ninety-five percent of the puzzles are logical and satisfying to solve, especially for escape room aficionados, there are a few clunkers. One required you to find a path through a spider’s web, collecting flies as you went. The game stated on one card that it wasn’t possible to eat all of the flies, yet the hint system said that you needed to do exactly that. The latter was true, but the dissonance was jarring. 

Additionally, asking for the solution will give you it without showing the working. A puzzle with jars, symbols and water droplets on two sides of an equation felt ludicrously complicated; the hint system obliged with the number I needed, but it revealed that the puzzle’s logic made no sense at all. One side of the equation required you to multiply the value of vases and add on the value of water drops. The other side required you to ignore that and just take the digits at face value to create a whole number. It made no sense.

Escape rooms are dependent on you discovering the logic of the room’s creator. If you are unable to do that and need to take a hint or even the answer, you should at the very least be told how the puzzle was constructed. This may also have helped with other puzzles later on, but here, the solution is all you receive, which deprives you of a forehead-smacking moment and instead leaves you thinking, 'huh?' 

I should stress that these examples were mostly outliers. Escape Tales does a decent job of following escape room staples, even if the stakes feel a bit lower. Yet despite the opportunity to make the story meatier than the format usually allows for, I still came away disappointed by the endings which all felt a bit throwaway. Though it touched on potentially interesting elements regarding Jen and Sammy’s relationship, neither character really felt more than paper thin. The supernatural side of things also felt half-baked. This may be partly due to the source game it’s based on, but it didn’t help that the English translation suffered from typos which extended to the achievements. 

‍Escape Tales clocks in at around two to three hours for a single playthrough, depending on your affinity for its puzzles. Even though multiple runs offer diminishing returns, there may still be fun to be gleaned from trying to reach all of its endings. It lacks the pizazz of Rooms of Realities, but Bluekey Games’ first non-VR escape room is still a good stab at the genre.