Do Gooder Press

I have to admit, I’ve developed a taste for “Escape the Room” games. I’m not the only one, as the concept has even inspired a kind of LARP version. They’re often kind of like the internet equivalent of those brain-teaser menus we used to get at restaurants or puzzle books one picked up at gas stations back in the day. These games started out doing what they said on the tin, giving you a locked room or rooms that had various puzzles and object-oriented challenges that you’d overcome to be given a final key or method to depart where you were trapped. These are kind of like the old point-n-click adventure games of the LucasArts era, but often with more math and graphical conundrums for you to figure out.

These are also games where whoever is putting them together may have a higher opinion of what basic arithmetic skills should be or what counts as “fair” when it comes to leaving hints. As with any game of this kind, your mileage may vary.

The scale of craft for these games is quite varied from ones good enough to have a steady fan base to ones that are cranked out in the hopes of generating ad clicks by people who barely understand how Flash works. And even bad escape games will get traffic, as it’s pretty easy to exhaust your supply of them if you seek them out regularly from a site like Escape Games 24. Before you dive in, let me link to a few of my favorites via it and other sites whose comment areas provide some oft-needed walkthroughs and hints.

The gold standard for these games seems to be ones from Japan. I don’t know if the games originated there, but the ones that most people seem to clamor for come from that part of the world. Here are the publishers I enjoy the most, with a few notes regarding their styles:

• Find the Escape Men: Note: The link also shows other games by the publisher, but the EM games are easy to spot. These are pretty low-fi graphics-wise, but the author(s?) have a sense of humor and sometimes even an occasional story arc. In general, you need to find 10 or so green guys who, in the end, combine to help you egress. Some things to keep in mind with these games is that they sometimes have “wait for it” Escape Men to collect. You might need to let the game sit while you stare at a window or a TV set for your target to appear and become clickable. There are also sometimes “sneaky” spots you might not notice, like the ability to look up in a scene, or something that changes if you do something elsewhere.

• Detarou Games: This guy has a bit of an absurdist aesthetic, so be warned that you’ll have some suggestive visuals going on (mostly uncomfortable-looking guys in skin-tight costumes doing oddball things). You’ll also have some of the more mind-bending puzzles out there from these games, often requiring you to connect the relationship between something on a piece of paper in one room, a clue in another, and the animation of a certain element in a third. The walkthroughs in the comments sections are a big help for these games, which are still trippy fun to go through. Most of these games have a secret red stamp to find after you open (but don’t go through) the final door for a perfect ending. Oh, and don’t trust the panda.

• Tesshi-E: Tesshi-E is another escape-artist who often has two endings for his games, one that’s okay and the other “happy” with bonus accolades. Somewhere in most of his games is a “Happy Coin” that gets you the better outcome, generally when you find a clue that doesn’t seem to apply to anything needed to escape but can be re-applied to a puzzle somewhere that you already solved (i.e. a second time setting for a clock, a second four-number code that can go in that safe, etc.). You’ll be in for lots of plastic birds wearing top-hats and wooden hippos along with top-notch puzzlin’.

One up-and-comer that really emphasizes something I like in Escape Games is Sniffmouse (the “Picture It” titles in that list are just jigsaw-style games, FYI). There’s something to be said for satisfying sound effects when you turn a key or open a container, and these games do that pretty well. They also have a fun library of sound effects for some of their characters and setups, so if you don’t mind some less-than-photorealistic visuals, you might find them satisfying.

If you’re truly an addict, then Escape Games 24 is probably a bookmark you’ll want to put in your menubar. Be warned that a lot of these games are shovelware, putting quality and cleverness far below the need to get something up on the web. Still, your mileage may vary and you might dig the occasional Ena or Games2Rule title… or you just might play them because nothing from your favorite publisher has shown up yet.