Elsewhere Electric

For context, I’m an escape room designer, and I love puzzles. I’ve played in over 50 escape rooms across America and have designed dozens more. With that experience in mind, this game just doesn’t do puzzles justice. [h3]Puzzle Design Issues[/h3] The overall concept is great, and the interaction between VR and mobile is genuinely well executed. However, the puzzles themselves felt repetitive and often poorly explained. Most of the time I had to look up the answers, and even then I still didn’t fully understand what the game was trying to tell me. They end up feeling too complex to be fun. [h3]Technical Problems[/h3] Even in the opening scene, there were far too many game-breaking bugs. The game refused to download on mobile, failed to connect repeatedly, and required multiple restarts of both the mobile device and PC just to get things working. Movement also had issues. Head rotation let you clip out of the play space, there was no smooth locomotion, and the play space height would randomly become way too tall or too small. [h3]Final Thoughts[/h3] Don’t get me wrong, the game is unique and clearly has a lot of effort behind it. But the puzzles need better clarity, and these bugs…

No tutorial, straight into unclear puzzles. Game is kinda alright but "puzzles" which will require just tell your partner same 3-4 symbols over and over is not fun. Also mechanics are not clear. Why you need to spend your "resources" to power things up? Why it is so limited and need to be refilled [b]manualy[/b] after each level? Refund

Really interesting and unique game. First impression is "What is it? Game about just explaining symbols? What?" But this impression is wrong, when you understand how game works - it starts to be very interesting. I'm at level 12 now and I'm willing to continue.

Super cool concept, and with a little more polish, I think this game could be a gem, but in its current state, I can't recommend it. The mobile app is problematic, and the controls do not always register correctly (grabbing the knob on the control panel worked 1 outta 10 times on an Index). Maybe it was created with a different headset in mind? If this game gets a patch or 2, cleaning up bugs and pain points, I think it could be a real winner for a winter night virtual escape room.

Very samey puzzles. The codes are exactly the same every level, [man in a keyhole, frothy milk, hazmat suit mask]. Sometimes it would be switched up and be [bucket, frothy milk, hazmat suit mask] but the phone operator could have easily just guessed every code after three levels. The rooms are also HUGE for there being nothing except two or three puzzles. So much teleporting around just to put some milk in a machine so that the phone player can enter the same code again.

The game is alright, but many aspects are not explained at all/well. The game is a cool concept, but they need a guide or an in-game book to help us out. Until SOMETHING comes out, I would avoid it until then.