This one barely scraped a thumbs up, I’m a little mixed on this one.

My immediate thought when I booted this up was that it was just very cheesy. Some cheese is fine, but I just had a bit of a “ugh” reaction to it at first. I can mainly put this down to the voice acting and script. The acting is done in a very over-the-top americanised accent, which honestly might be fine for some but it was just a bit much for me.
I actually didn’t expect there to be a narration to this. I only skimmed the trailer before playing it, and although it literally says “a narrative puzzle adventure”, I thought this just meant a few obscure notes here and there. It doesn’t really show off the narration at all in either trailer.
Then the script was just kind of bad. I genuinely can’t even think of a good example to write down because i’m about 90% sure you’ll read it in your head in an acceptable way, when actually it comes across a bit lame. There are definitely parts you can tell that are written to be funny but the humour just fell completely flat for me. I feel a bit harsh saying all of this really, but that’s how I felt about it. I kind of just got used to it/filtered it out eventually to focus on the puzzle elements.

The story is, in my opinion, a bit “meh”. It’s not horribly bad, it’s just, “meh”. There is nothing all that captivating here. I was mainly playing this for a bit of an “escape room” type puzzle experience, so for me this was fine. I can see what they were going for, and it’s a decent effort, but If you want a good story, I don’t think you’ll find it here.

In terms of the gameplay, there is some “escape room” here, although there isn’t a lot of the classic style I was hoping for. You kind of start in one place, quickly “escape” that, as a kind of tutorial, I suppose, then you need to leave the building, and do another quick, more “surreal”, puzzle before actually getting to the more classic escape room portion.
This part, I did enjoy, although I do wish it was longer. I love escape room puzzles that you have to search for things, unlock things to access something that you need for something else, etc.
You’re given a corkboard to use to pin things that you find and this was something I was actually quite excited about, before I realised you barely use it and the escape room portion is interrupted a few times by your character passing out and waking up in surreal side-task environments.

I wasn’t expecting any kind of surreal element to this game, usually I really enjoy this stuff. I love the kind of surrealism where you turn to the door you just came through and it’s gone. I love “surreal” when it has its place, but here it felt like it was interrupting the part I actually wanted to do.
The surreal levels also have this blur on them that is quite hard on the eyes. My first thought was more so “surely this will make some people feel sick” rather than any kind of appreciation for the environment you find yourself in all of a sudden.
There was also this random level that kind of just turns into a platformer for a second. I love platformers, but it didn’t feel consistent with the rest of the game and my first thought was that if you wanted a escape room puzzle game and ended up with platforming, where you have to time levers and jumps, that’s surely going to annoy some people. I didn’t really enjoy that part and as I said, I love platformers.

Back to the escape room bit, and as I said before I did enjoy this part overall. I enjoyed the puzzles, for me they felt like they had a good balance as they weren’t too easy, but also were not too difficult.
I played this on the Steam Deck, so for me the controls were a little janky but I found it manageable. The worst of it was opening certain things not being very intuitive. The amount of times I completely backed out of the laptop and had to re-enter the password when I was only meaning to close an application on the laptop was a little annoying.

After the escape room section you end up in a more open environment, which you also need to leave, so the theme of “escaping” is actually consistent throughout. Just in different ways in different environments. I would have enjoyed more of the classic escape room stuff, but I do admire that it’s something a little different.

I have been negative so far, but this game did still scrape a thumbs up. To actually talk about some positives,

The graphics are really nice. I was really impressed with one of the first environments you see in the game, and found myself a few times just admiring the lighting in the room, or the bright colours of the outside environment.

The music is also an absolute vibe in this game. I was wondering when I was playing it if the developer created the music especially for the game or took the music from an actual band to put in the game. Looking into it now, it seems that it was music from a real band, although I have no idea if there are any links to the developer. I would actually go as far as to say the music was one of my favourite parts of this game. That might sound like a bad thing given that it’s a puzzle game, but the music just fits so well and really adds to it.

This game was developed by one person, and it was their debut game. Although it’s not perfect, I still enjoyed it. If you go into this expecting not a classic escape room puzzle game, but a more experimental narrative experience, I think you could enjoy it as well. It’s fairly short, and will kill some time but still engage your brain a bit.

Achievements: Included
There are some missable achievements, but they are all pretty straightforward to get as the descriptions are fairly obvious. One of the mini-game achievements was a bit of a pain but it was actually not as bad as I was expecting.

For more reviews of this genre, check out my curator page The Best: First-Person Puzzle Games