Help Me Escape! The Puzzle Maker's Office

[quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/]Follow our curator page: [b]IndieGems[/b] if you like and want to see more reviews like this one.[/url][/quote] [i]Help Me Escape! The Puzzle Maker's Office[/i] is a really fun virtual text-message escape-room adventure made by Brahn Games that is just a good time in general. It is the same as an escape room, except that you are not the individual locked inside. You receive a text-message from an unknown number--Wendy (AI), who finds herself inside a locked room, with a cell phone and only one number, yours! She texts you and asks for help. So that is what you shall do. Through some simple commands, you can tell Wendy to go to the few locations in the room, to look around, and to perform certain tasks. There are some interactive objects available and some others that may or may not become available as you progress through the puzzles. The puzzles are not easy, in fact, a couple of them may require you to go look up a separate reference. I suppose while you cannot do that in a normal escape-room, who is to tell you that you cannot access outside references? After all, Wendy is the person stuck in there, and …

Food for Thought Review: This is a new type of puzzle game I never encountered before. Usually there are puzzle games where you the player gets stuck in a place and you either have a point and click style to solve an area. Or there are games where you have text-adventure base games where the game tells you what available options you have to basically try to solve it. This is the opposite where you tell an Ai (name Wendy) of what she have available options to use. Did it accomplish that goal? Well, not a whole lot but I like the concept. How the game works is that you need to help Wendy getting out of the puzzle maker’s office, the only communication you have is a phone. You got to guide Wendy of which area she have to go, ask her to take pictures etc. The idea on paper sounds good but the execution needs work, mainly for the input response. How many times did I told Wendy to go to that area, or do something to that object, or try to do anything and she is restricted to certain commands that I have to know and tell her which once are the correct response. Is literally guiding an Ai of Dora the Explorer on how to beat the game and I’m the narrator just pulling my hair as she keeps…

A mediocre text-based game with infuriatingly inconsistent inputs. The puzzles could have been bland but diverting if it were not for the annoyingly specific inputs required to do things (I mean relative to other text based games here). Rather try Event[0] for a new take on genre.

Interesting escape room twist - the puzzles are a bit challenging, but they do offer hints through their website. Once you play it all the way through, you can go back and go through the game pretty fast, but also try different things to solve the puzzles.

Partially on me, didn't realize it was text-based when I bought it. Not the worst, but it definitely leaves a lot to be desired. I felt that sometimes the results were obvious but without a list of known commands or something, guiding the person you're texting becomes difficult, and made the game not fun for me.