3 ms·
The puzzle conundrum continues to live on, though. Some time ago, I bought a game app from the "escape room" variety. It's got no relation to escape rooms, it's
by tgv 4y ago
The puzzle conundrum continues to live on, though. Some time ago, I bought a game app from the "escape room" variety. It's got no relation to escape rooms, it's just how it's called/advertised. It consists of a sequence of situations where you have to find a final item, which the game recognizes as exit, so that's perhaps why.
After the first level, the puzzles were rather convoluted and opposite to anything that would happen in real life. The "protagonist" decides to go to a bank (i.e., the next level is at the bank), and there passwords are hidden on a scrap of paper behind a ventilation grating in the toilet or as a bar-column in a financial report. Who would ever do that? You open a secret area by making sure the folders in two cabinets are in the same order. Then, when you find a cheque to the protagonist's father, he decides that's all the information the bank will reveal, and since he doesn't understand why that cheque was written in the first place, the next level obviously will be --I bet you already guessed it-- his father's church.
At the church, you find a note taped to the inside of the bell in the bell tower. Then you ring the bell a few times, and the thing, which is larger than the protagonist, so must weigh several tonnes, comes crashing down. It lands in one piece on the church floor, and you can access the note. Then you have to move the pews in some pattern in order to access something else. In real life, it would be obvious that there is a mechanism attached to the pews, but the game just makes things visible or invisible as long as it keeps the player on the happy path.
So yeah, I gave up on that one.
- mikepurvis 4y agoYouTube game reviewer SkillUp talks frequently about the importance of great writing in selling mundane, repetitive content to players, particularly when it comes to single-objective side quests in open world games. He references The Witcher 3 as a game with many great examples (like the famous frying pan quest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4), but another one that is often referenced is the Supideo quest line in AC: Odyssey ( https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo). Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever. However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements: - Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows. - Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house. - Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room. Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.