Real Escape Game: Escape from The Cursed Spirit of The Abandoned School

This is one of those tricky reviews to write. Some games are well presented but poorly designed; some are just bad; but Escape from the Cursed Spirit of the Abandoned School has a great deal that’s notably clever and original, and even so I just didn’t enjoy playing it very much. And the biggest reason for that is what’s ostensibly the game’s biggest selling point, its IP tie-in.

The game is based on Jujutsu Kaisen, which is apparently one of the best-selling manga/anime franchises of all time, and has a plot based around high school students learning magical arts needed to defeat evil spirits. In the game you’re helping three of the characters from the show to deal with a spirit haunting an old school, and there’s a neat in-game justification for why you’re only helping remotely. And, as an even smarter piece of immersion, your own sorcerer skills involve paper manipulation of various kinds, such that solving something with the paper items provided allows you to manipulate something in the game world.

In concrete terms, you have a glossy packet of papers, plus an online portal. The webpage provides story video and a place to enter solutions. From the video you may know what effect you wish to achieve, and using the rules of your ‘magic’ you can use the physical paper items, which if done correctly resolves to a keyword, which can be entered into the website to unlock the next step.

Earlier on there’s plenty of hand-holding to make sure you get the idea, but the difficulty ramps up as you go on. Real Escape Game tend to have final puzzles that require you to make a leap of intuition to solve, synthesising multiple hints and pieces of story information to find an answer, and that’s the case here too.

Challenging finale notwithstanding, the puzzles are scrupulously fair. The idea for how to use physical components to create magical effects is inspired, a very creative and distinctive idea that also complements the story.

And yet. From when we started the game, it was over fifteen minutes before we reached the first puzzle; and that first puzzle was a spot-the-difference. In two hours of game play, about half the time consisted of video cut-scenes. The video content used characters from the anime, with the actual voice actors; but since neither of us had watched it, that added little for us. And a lot of the video felt gratuitous, unnecessarily extended for the benefit of those playing due to a love of the source material. While the central puzzle concept is genuinely brilliant, over half the game’s puzzles re-use that same idea. And there was enough ambiguity in the symbols used that we repeatedly stumbled across answers intended for later parts of the game, mistaking them for what we were supposed to use for the current step.

On reflection, the puzzles’ strengths more than make up for their weaker points, and I want to have liked this game much more than I did; and the reason I didn’t was, more than anything, because each few minutes of solving was broken by another long stretch of cut-scene dialog. Fans of the series may love this, despite an animation style that’s far more basic than that in the actual show; for us it seriously interfered with our enjoyment of the game.

There’s an option to exit each video and read the dialog instead, which perhaps might have improved things. I hate giving a low rating here, because this is a game that’s highly distinctive and contains some really smart, satisfying puzzle ideas… but for me, the moments of joy were overshadowed by the overall experience.