Author Archives: escapethereview

Unlock!: Professor Noside’s Animal-O-Matic

Room-in-a-box, Apr 2021

Professor Noside, Unlock’s recurring villain, is back for a fourth game; this time, instead of trying to foil his latest plot, you’re helping extract him from a predicament of his own making, after an accident with his latest Animal-o-matic invention… (more)

Unlock!: In The Clutches of Hades

Room-in-a-box, Apr 2021

Where I’ve disliked Unlock games before, it’s pretty much always been due to confusing puzzles or overly harsh penalty-giving. In The Clutches Of Hades doesn’t particularly suffer from either of those problems, but managed to put me off it through th… (more)

66 Minuten: Showdown

Online, Mar 2021

The list of avatar games that have actually been created for that format, rather than built for physical play then converted through necessity, is exceedingly short; but the release of Showdown extends that list by one. And like some of the others on… (more)

KW Escapes: Twister

Online, Feb 2021

Canadian company KW Escapes were one of the early pioneers of the avatar format, and although they switched back to in-person games only for a while, ongoing lockdowns mean another chance to play their games remotely, including the newly adapted Twis… (more)

Immersia: The Piccadilly Cabaret

Online, Jan 2021

To the extent that the still very young genre of avatar escape rooms has settled on a ‘standard, recommended’ approach, Immersia are following that approach closely: Zoom for the video call, an initial orientation to make sure players know what they’… (more)

The Panic Room: Frankenstein’s Book

Room-in-a-box, Apr 2021

With all of The Panic Room’s puzzle books, I recommend pulling the pages out and cutting them up where directed, rather than trying to preserve the book intact; with Frankenstein’s book it was immediately clear that that was the only way to approach … (more)

The Panic Room: Panic Room

Room-in-a-box, Feb 2021

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… (more)

The Panic Room: The Book of Grimm

Room-in-a-box, Jan 2021

In addition to their fairly huge range of online games, The Panic Room now have a considerable library of puzzle books. Some of them, including this one, are also available as self-print PDFs with the same content, which makes the books fairly close … (more)

Unlock!: Mission #07

Room-in-a-box, Mar 2021

In Unlock box sets the third game is normally the hardest; while it’s not always the best of the three it often is, and I’d say Mission #07 is the strongest of the Epic Adventures set. The deck of cards for this game is split into two halves with dif… (more)

Unlock!: The Dragon’s Seven Tests

Room-in-a-box, Mar 2021

Once every seven years the famous Master Li accepts new disciples to the Temple of the Gold Dragons – and that premise should give you an idea of this game’s theming, layered with absolutely every oriental stereotype you can think of, where inscrutab… (more)