Welcome back to Detective Month! Last week, we looked at the storybook cyber-noir detective game of LA-1! This week, we take a look at the Escape Room game of Crime Unfolds! A Pop-Up Escape Game 3D: Immersive Crime Game!
Every few months, my friends Charlie and Allison and I get together to play games … usually Escape Room games! They are my Escape Room buddies! This month, we are trying out the Crime Unfolds cooperative Escape Room game! Nominally, we are detectives solving a crime!
We’ll discuss our first impressions and thoughts on the Crime Unfolds system. It also brings up a few questions to ask yourself about Escape Room games. Why do you like them? Or maybe … Why do you dislike them?
Requires an App
Crime Unfolds requires an app! That is maybe the first thing you should know. Some people love Apps with their Escape Room games, and some people don’t. It’s really not clear by looking at the book that this requires an App. It’s not a big deal, as Charlie went and got one real quick.
There are 6 cases interspersed in this game. We started with case 1. We also, like many escape room games, started with lots of “random stuff we know will be useful later”.
Solve The Puzzle vs. Express the Answer
Over the course of one night. Charlie and Allison and Richie embarked on the first case! It’s supposed to take an hour … it took us more than two hours. And we are experienced Escape Roomers?? What Gives?
The problem we had over and over was not “how we do we solve the puzzle” but “how do you express the solution”? We easily solved a bunch of the puzzles, but inputting into the app was the main hurtle!
For example: At one point, we had “shifted” away from a screen that had the arrows for directionality, so we thought we had to express NSEW via UP/DOWN or North/South/East/West using letters on the command line? We lost at least 15 minutes … when we realized the App had those arrows in another screen. It was very frustrating! We had solved the puzzle, but the app had made is less than intuitive to enter.
We were pretty frustrated after this game, but after thinking about it overnight, I have come to realize that most puzzle games are like this! You have to do two things:
- Solve the puzzle
- Express The Solution
Solving the puzzle is usually the funner part, and some games make it very easy to express the solution. We loved Doomensions (see our review here), as expressing the solution was easy; it always took the same form as a 3 or 4 digit code. Here in Crime Unfolds, the solution expressed itself in so many different ways! Sometimes it was interacting with some widgets on the app! Sometimes it was saying the right thing at the command line interface! Sometimes it pressing the right buttons!
Our frustration with Crime Unfolds was how to express the solution! Many times during the game, we felt like we solved the puzzle, but couldn’t move forward because the solution wasn’t expressed in the way we expected it!
After cogitating on this some more, I realized this expressing the solution can be just as interesting as solving the puzzle! To express your solution, you have to change your perspective!! What’s the best way to express this solution? What’s the most thematic way to express this solution? What’s the perspective of the player in the game? All of these contribute to different ways to express the solution. To be fair, sometimes the expression of the solution is poorly done, and that’s just a frustration of this genre. I think if you reset your thinking that expressing the solution is part of the puzzle, then it can less frustrating. I realize how hard it can be to do in the heat of the moment, so it’s easy to say this.
To enjoy Crime Unfolds, you will absolutely have to enjoy thinking about new ways to express a solution to a puzzle.
Pop-Up Cool! But You Need A Magnifying Glass!
One of things that was very cool about Crime Unfolds was the pop-up scenes that came out of the book! It turns out 6 rooms in the book, and you take a turns visiting some of these rooms in each case. They look really cool! See above!
Unfortunately, some of the text/symbols on the board are hard to read! At one point, Charlie went and got his “fine work” magnifying glasses/helmet! We also used our phones to zoom in so we could see things!
The pop-up stuff works well, but be aware that you may have to really zoom on the board. There is just a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” and “I can barely see that” in this game.
Conclusion
Did we like Crime Unfolds? Yes and no. We only played one case, but we think it is fairly representative of what this game is. The pop-up system works and has a very “toy” and “fun” factor to it; that was something we definitely liked. We liked solving the puzzles but found expressing the solutions frustrating. I think, upon further reflection, that if you go into the game knowing expression the solutions is PART of the puzzle, that might help make that more enjoyable.
I hope I can talk Charlie and Allison into playing more cases from this book; I think there’s some fun puzzles here, but I hope we can just get over the frustrations when expressing the puzzle solutions.
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