Edaqa’s Room: Office

The latest game from designer Edaqa is, like the previous ones, a slick and cheerful point ‘n’ click puzzler designed for cooperative play. It shares the same clear cartoony art style, and feels polished, the creation of an experienced designer using a mature platform. With physical escape rooms, office decor tends to mean low-effort, but here the setting provides a rich source of puzzle ideas enlivened by some gentle mocking of the mundanity of the 9 to 5 working environment.

The game provides checklists of tasks for you to complete, though not until you’re a little way into it; that works well, since to begin with you can happily jump into anything that looks like a puzzle, and it’s only later that you might need a pointer to what remains unfinished. Although there a built-in inventory system, there’s little here that’s about finding the right combinations of items to use together. Instead, it’s a style of puzzle that’s much closer to the escape room genre. It also feels more compact than some of the previous games: at least as much puzzle content packed into fewer screens, meaning less navigating around trying to find things.

We played it as a pair, in different locations. The game platform is designed for that and in many ways handles it admirably: you can each independently explore the same environment, but the inventory is shared, and you receive alerts when your teammate solves something. As long as you have an audio call running in parallel, that works fairly well. However, it lends itself to each player solving different parts of the game in parallel, whereas my preference is for a more collaborative style of play. For that reason, I think it would be better suited to two players sharing a single screen; or best of all, both players using separate devices, but in the same location so they can easily confer.

As with the previous Edaqa games, I found the puzzles to be not just well-designed but also fresh and original. At one point I thought it required external knowledge, but that turned out not to be the case. My impression was of a smooth difficulty gradient that started out with fairly simple puzzles and gradually became more challenging – though of course since it’s a fairly non linear game it might just be that we started with the ones we found easiest. We took one hint (via the integrated context-sensitive hint system), for something that we’d written off as being just a joke but which actually concealed a key piece of information; I’m in two minds whether that needed a touch more signposting or whether we should just have been more vigilant.

If you aren’t a fan of the point ‘n’ click genre, this has enough crossover appeal that it might be worth trying anyway; and if you are, then it should be a safe bet. It maintains the qualities of the previous games and continues to improve, for an all round impressive puzzle game that looks good and is satisfying to solve.