The Escapement: The Network

I'm slightly surprised this is getting such good reviews as we felt let down by such an expensive boxed game.

Starting with the good stuff - the production value is excellent.  I haven't experience a play-at-home game that matches this one although that is reflected in the price.  The story was good although the videos were a little long and we lost interest during them a bit. There were a couple of really nice puzzles too, although overall the puzzles were a tad mediocre and a couple were poor.  In my book a good puzzle should be challenging but once you figure it out you should be sure you have the right answer. For several of these puzzles we had the right answer but weren't confident we did or we found their wording ambigous leading to multiple possible solutions.

The real flaw in this game was the answer system.  You have to enter a combination which involves the answers to multiple puzzles at once and if it's wrong you don't have any idea which bit is wrong. When that is coupled with poor puzzles with ambiguous wording you end up in a very frustrating position where you have too many combinations to feasibly try.  This problem is compounded by the hint system which we found basically useless.  When we couldn't find the right combination of answers we looked to the hints to help narrow things down but they only told us things we already knew and didn't remove any of the ambiguity we were seeing.

I'm afraid we found the middle video unpleasant to watch (do not play this with children) to such an extent that we basically skipped that puzzle.

The other frustrating thing is that you can only play it once.  As the game was so expensive we tried very hard to play it in such a way that we might be able to give it to friends to play afterwards. But that was basically impossible. £40 is a lot for a single-play box game.