

But on my own, Escape Simulator offers a far more tangible sense of the feeling of playing a real-world escape room, one spaceship aside, keeping things within the realms of possibility. There’s a co-op mode, even, so you can be trapped in these escape rooms with a chum, which sounds absolutely fantastic. This is so bloody good, and it’s kept me happy all week. The game came out in October, and despite being incredibly well-received on Steam, has had a deeply peculiar lack of press coverage. And even better, a DLC pack from the developers is due in June, with larger rooms and a four-hour expected run-time. Unfortunately, none of the player-made rooms exactly shine just now, although a Darth Vadar-themed level is incredibly inventive. Then, all those finished, you can either jump into the room creator tool, or play those created by others. You can approach them in any order, but there’s a gentle curve of difficulty if you play them in order. The 22 rooms are grouped into four groups of five, and then a couple of bonus rooms at the end. Once that timer runs out, nothing else changes, and while I finished a bunch of rooms in under the time, I found things far more relaxing in others once I realised I wasn’t going to make it, and just took my time. You gather everything that seems important, take closer looks by hitting Space and then inspecting items in 3D, and start piecing together possible combinations for padlocks, passwords and code-solving.Įach room (but for one) has a 15-minute timer, but this is only for a trophy. There will be notes, post-its, peculiar patterns on walls, keys hidden behind plant pots, and so on. With each new room, you take a moment to get your bearings, look around all four walls, and then begin looting the place for clues. Or indeed you can approach things far more methodically, be very neat and tidy, and even dispose of unnecessary items by popping them in the bin. It means you can pull heavy boxes off shelves, drag office chairs out of the way, throw annoying books across the room, and just make an enormous mess. What makes the ransacking all the more special here is the first-person perspective combined with the realistic physics. But each works in the same way: you’re in a room, there’s a lot of stuff, and you need to ransack the place to solve all its puzzles.

There are familiar office settings, posh country mansions, and indeed a futuristic spaceship. Escape Simulator‘s huge number of incredibly detailed rooms vary between incredibly possible to be recreated in the world, and delightfully impossible given our relative inaccessibility to space travel.
