The Panic Room: Panic Room

The Panic Room’s original eponymous game was about alien conspiracy theories, and this puzzle book follows the same theme, though I don’t believe there’s any cross-over in puzzle content with the physical room. As with the company’s other books, it’s a spiral bound set of colour pages which are intended to be cut up during play, which contain a set of puzzles that can be tackled in any order, with the first challenge being to work out which pieces of information are relevant to which puzzle.

The game structure suits the theme, searching for linkages between scattered clues – if you’re really getting into it you could tack the pages on a cork-board and attach red string between different items, full conspiracy theorist style. As usual for these books, there’s a website where you enter each solution as you find it, which indicates whether your answer is correct, and when you’ve solved everything it lets you unlock the game’s conclusion video.

I thought the website hints for this one were a step up, with more granular hints and more detail given. One puzzle suffers a little from the printing being a bit dark, making it hard to make out important details (at least, in my copy); there’s also a certain amount of deciphering to be done from alien glyphs that take some concentration to distinguish from each other.

There are other Panic Room puzzle books that I preferred to this one, but this is a solid offering with good value for money for price versus puzzling time.