Escape Simulator

very fun and peaceful to play with friend not too easy not too hard

As far as I'm aware this is the game that kickstarted the current 3D escape room trend. It's very competently made, but I think I just fundamentally don't find this type of game interesting. It ultimately falls into that "I don't find the idea of clicking things to be inherently entertaining" space. One of the constraints about escape games that I find really interesting is that if you're aiming for any kind of narrative, you have to build an environment that is at least superficially naturalistic. If you fall into that old Hanna-Barbera thing where the item that's about to move is clearly drawn differently from the background, you undermine your own game. This is a needle the Rusty Lake games thread really well, incidentally. One of the problems with these games where the settings are escape rooms first is that none of the objects are naturalistic, so it's immediately obvious what you're going to be interacting with. The exact way to interact with it may be tricky or veiled, but the tiny room with a giant black hole in the wall isn't hiding its cards. And to me, this hyperartificialty, where no room would ever actually exist this way, kind of ruins the experience for me. In a real escape room you have the excitement of trying to solve something as a group, after a few drinks, against a timer, etc -- and more importantly, you're interacting with the physical objects, turning handles, lining up locks, looking under vases; there are physical realities that make the artificiality of the setup irrelevant. But in a game, dropping me into a small space that is clearly set up as a puzzle to solve removes the thing that a game can bring to the table, while also not having the things a physical space brings to the table. And in a 3D space, there's just too much room for excess. Requiring me to do the same puzzle a half dozen times to move on is certainly a unique thing you get in a digital escape room that you can't in a physical, but it's also not something I've ever wanted out of a puzzle game. It's adding stuff for the sake of their being more stuff. I again found myself thinking the genre is better for its constraints, in this case of a 2D 'room' environment. The end result is that this is a game of click sequences, and, well, that doesn't really do anything for me. The game's main way of trying to compensate is by hiding teeny-tiny little stickers you have to find in each level, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ does this not help the feeling of Sisyphean pointlessness I already was finding inherent to the basic premise. It might as well have us memorize long strings of numbers to unlock the next door rpgmaker style; tiny hidden things is the 3D puzzle version of that. I can recognize that a) one of the big selling points of this game is its coop features and room-building, which I respect as a thing people would really enjoy, and b) that people who are looking for games as low-stakes entertainment and not narrative probably do just want to figure out click sequences, and if you fall into those categories the production values here are really high and I get why it would be appealing. But the kind of things I personally look for in a game just aren't really here, and I'll likely stay away from 3D room games going forward.