Author Archives: escapethereview

The Panic Room: My Dearest Emily

Online, May 2020

In between The Panic Room’s various CSI-themed online games, My Dearest Emily sticks out rather. In stark contrast to the usual escape room themes of peril and world-saving, it’s set in a lesser-known part of 19th Century US history, and tells a gent… (more)

Hysteria Escape Rooms: Project Blue Book

Online, May 2020

Project Bluebook is based around UFO investigations. Whereas in The Bank Job the puzzles followed the narrative sequence of a bank heist, Bluebook is a bit more abstract, though builds up to a denouement of sorts.

Bluebook uses the same Google Forms… (more)

Hysteria Escape Rooms: The Bank Job

Online, May 2020

Playing an escape game from home requires a little extra suspension of disbelief, when players are sitting in a familiar living room not a simulated bank vault. Some games deal with that by saying the players are ‘remote support’ or some such; The Ba… (more)

Crime Runners: Back To The Congressman

Online, May 2020

Not having (yet) played Crime Runners’ physical escape rooms, I don’t know the details of the story of which this online game is a continuation. That wasn’t a barrier to playing this, though it did make me quite curious to go and discover what the ea… (more)

Pentargo Escape Room: Pentargo Quarantine

Online, May 2020

Online escape games vary greatly in style. Some are essentially paper-based puzzles delivered digitally, others are more like puzzle-centric computer games. And some use a ‘realism’ style where the game isn’t presented as a set of puzzles, but as a r… (more)

Free online escape games

In the time of corona, many escape room creators have been busy creating online games, and many of them have generously made their games available at no charge. I binge-played over 50 of them, and (after recovering) have put together a quick summary of each of them. When a company puts out a game for… Read More »

clueQuest: Stolen IQ

Online, Apr 2020

An upfront warning for this game: clueQuest’s title ‘Print + Cut + Escape’ is accurate in all its parts. Before the Escape and after the Print, there is a great deal of Cut – you need to go through the game’s pages and cut out a great many components… (more)

Co-Decode: A Jewel In Jeopardy

Online, Apr 2020

There’s an elegance in economic design. And where the other print and play games I’ve tried consist of a fat wad of pages, Co-Decode’s game consists of a mere 3-5 sheets (their game description avoids specifying the exact number, so I’ll follow suit)… (more)

Bewilder Box & Eltham Escapes: Sector X: The B.R.U.C.E. Project Part 1

Online, Apr 2020

A collaboration from the escape room companies Bewilder Box and Eltham Escapes, Sector X is an online escape game where you must guide the robot B.R.U.C.E. through a series of puzzles. The new breed of online escapes is very diverse in style, and thi… (more)

Time Run Presents: Sherlock: The Game Is Now

London, Feb 2020

In the early years, as escape rooms spread throughout the U.K., one London venue quickly gained an international reputation for production values that were streets ahead of anywhere else, as well as a variety of then unheard of innovations such as a … (more)