Escape The Crate

This game didn't quite hit the mark for us.  Small things could go a long way to making this more pleasantly playable.  It was frustrating to repeatedly have to close out of endless pop-up screens just to get back to the inventory screen.  Everything you clicked on created another pop-up screen on top of other pop-up screens, like a deck of cards to sort through. 

The puzzles were fine, no particularly satisfying ones, or "aha" moments.  Their Yeti game continues to be our favorite.

We overall enjoyed this game.  As a previous reviewer mentioned, the hint system wasn't great.  When we did need to get a hint, we had the choice to either get a hint for something that we already solved ages ago, or for something else which we didn't know anything about.  The hint said "tablet" but we didn't have a tablet.  Turns out that was the help we needed, but it was confusing and we spent some time trying to decide if we should click on it or not. 

Some items stayed in the inventory all through the game even though we had finished with them, which made it difficult to know what we should be focusing on.  

It was fun to explore the Pirate ship, the puzzles were all on theme and some of them were quite cute and fun. 

EMIT agent - free the prisoner and finish his mission. 

Quite a big game. We counted around 8 "places/rooms". Only a few puzzles each place of course but still a big game. Collecting puzzles, anagrams (which we are not fans of) and some very nice mirror action is what stood out to us. Some props were used in several puzzles. We also chuckled of a few story items. 

This game had nice puzzles, but we were not fans of the format. When playing a telescape game before we have been very happy with the 360 degrees view of rooms and that just wasn't part of this game. Also - one of the main game features was that you had to type in the name of two things to combine them. It feels like a very dated interface. Design wise, it felt a bit stock-photory at times - which it probably is. Not really a problem, but not a big aesthetic experience either. The hint system could have used some better naming - you had to choose what puzzle you wanted a hint for, but we couldn't connect the puzzle to the name.

If you can get into things without a fancy interface, we would recommend this game. 

Although we expected the game to be easy (being Christmas and all) we didn't expect it to be quite so short (20 min for 2 players).  Not as smooth a production as their Yeti game, but cute and probably best for families with young children.

Some clever puzzles but also some that just didn’t work for me and the non puzzle activity was just not my ballgame and the part about splitting the group was not an option for me playing alone. The first part was easy but part 2 did require some more and it would have helped to be 2 or maybe even 3 Players. 

The way you have to confirm game changes and going through the narrative part feels a bit slow and the constant change of pace was an anoyance but not a major issue. 

Even though I written a lot of complaint the game was still a good experience and I hope that EtC’s other games are just a little better. 

Still a thumps up(maybe just a little one)

Adventures in the snow with angry yetis.

Nice puzzles. Early telescape game, so most gameplay had you combine things by writing names in a text box. Not a real world room first.

We had problems with a map puzzle, because you had to be really precise in adding elements and it didn't register the part of the element that felt natural for us. We used hints to confirm that we were right in placement and then we knew we had to fiddle things to make it work. A bit frustrating. 

We really like a puzzle about footprints. 

In general the game had a nice flow and it was fun to combine a lot of things towards the end.