The biggest difference between Children of Wyrmwoods and its predecessors is the absence of a game board. There’s a map to unfold, once you’re told to (it’s written on it, so it’s not a spoiler to tell you), but your table will definitely be laid out differently to the previous games by the time you reach the epilogue.

Building character

Children of Wyrmwoods is trying to be an adventure game from the get-go, and this time around you get a character card. Your protagonist – Gilbert – has statistics, just like in a role-playing game. Certain items and cards you gain during the game will affect your stats, and the path you trample through the game’s forks and twists depend on your stats at times. It’s not an RPG, or something like Mage Knight. It is, after all, still an escape room game, but it’s a nice change to the formula.

Although the character stats are a nice addition, it’s a little bit loosely implemented. The way the items are given to you, and the amounts they boost or reduce your stats, there’s never really a moment where you just squeak in by one point. It’s there to give you the feeling of customising your character, but the branches you choose are usually quite black-and-white in terms of what you can do. I think some of this is down to me, and the way I like to peer behind the curtain to see the wizard, and examine how games works, so I think for the majority of players it’ll still feel pretty cool.

The other cool thing the game does for the first time in the series, is to let you combine items. Just like in the Adventure Game series from Kosmos, you can enter the card numbers of two things into the app and see if you make a new thing, just like in a point and click video game. It’s done well, and the combinations are all very logical. There’s no ‘rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle’ levels of abstract thinking, and it helps the game feel fresh after the previous two outings.

Back on track

In my previous review for Low Memory, I said that I was a bit disappointed after playing The Awakening before it. Things felt a bit disjointed, and there were a few design choices that didn’t gel with me. I’m extremely happy to say that Children of Wyrmwoods gets right back on track, and surpasses the original in just about every way. The puzzles are great, the story is really engaging, and your choices feel really meaningful, like you’ve just made a major fork in the story. While you had to make similar choices in the previous games, it never really felt like you were missing too much after your choices.

The theme and setting for the game are really nicely tied to the narrative and the puzzles, and although there’s still some disjoints in the way a solution is meant to fix the problem in front of you, it’s better than in the previous games. The third book in the box has the biggest change in the series so far. I won’t spoil the surprise for you, but I’ll tell you that the training wheels get taken off, and you’d better be switched-on to finish the game.

The balance in the puzzles’ difficulty feels much better than in Low Memory, where at times it veered off into being simply too difficult to be enjoyable. It’s challenging still, but you never really reach the stage where you’ve got a full notebook and calculator just to figure things out.

Final thoughts

Children of Wyrmwoods is the best escape room game I’ve played. It’s easily the best in the Escape Tales series. It feels like the first two games were more experimental, and that this third game is the one where they’ve perfected the formula. Don’t get me wrong, The Awakening and Low Memory are still good games, but with Wyrmwoods, Lockme have smoothed off the rough edges. They’ve found their feet and the game really shines as a result.

While the first two games gave you the option of replaying to make a few different choices, I was never really desperate to. With Children of Wyrmwoods however, I really do want to go back and play it again. There’s a point early in the game where you make a big choice, and I saw puzzles later in the game where the two paths converged again, which made me wonder what I’d missed out on. I ended up with items I never used because my journey took me down a different path, and I want to know what they’re for, dagnabbit!

According to the box, there are over 60 different endings! I’m not sure how different they are, but I had a hard choice from four at the end of my game, and those were after a difficult choice of three. The writing is better in this third game, but I’m not sure if that’s just because the translations overall are better. In short, Children of Wyrmwoods is a fantastic game, with a great story, and if you’re a fan of escape room games like Exit or Unlock, you really need to get this one. It’s fantastic, and you won’t go disappointed or frustrated. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods (2020)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 450 mins

The post Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If this is the first Escape Tales review you’ve read here, I suggest jumping back to read my review of The Awakening first. The mechanisms and the way the game works in Low Memory is nearly identical. The biggest change is the way the story is split into three interwoven stories, each with its own book. It’s a nice change of direction, as it gives you a natural point to stop, save, and have something fresh to come back to the next time you play.

Once again, the game is drive by the same website-pretending-to-be-an-app, and it works well on all the devices I tried it with.

Techno, techno, techno

While the first game was set in a slightly paranormal space, with magical incantations and portals, Low Memory has gone for the archetypal Future setting. You can tell, because the art is full of screens and sweeping curves, and the puzzle numbers in the app are meant to look like hexadecimal values, and have a bitmap-style font. It’s a nice change of direction, and it got me excited to see where they might go with it.

Unfortunately, the theme feels a bit pasted-on for most of the game. Things do get a bit more interesting in the third book, which ties the first two together, but up until that point you honestly could have put the puzzles in any setting and not have noticed it was meant to be futuristic. You might be reading this and thinking I sound a bit down on the game already, and in all honesty, you’re probably right. I had high hopes when I tore the shrinkwrap off the box, because I really enjoyed The Awakening.

The good…

Low Memory does a few things really nicely. Moving from location to location feels better implemented than in The Awakening, which felt more like ping-ponging back and forth in the same rooms for most of it. I like the fact there are areas that you don’t get paragraph numbers for until you’ve managed to gain access to that part of the map card.

I also like the story, which is really nicely done. My trouble with a lot of games, especially escape-style games, is that I like to bounce from puzzle to puzzle, solving them as fast as I can. I’m pretty competitive in most things, and I think that’s just more of the same. You shouldn’t try to speedrun your games like I do sometimes. If you can absorb the flavour text and story in Low Memory, you’ll find yourself absorbed in a really interesting adventure. The connections between the first two books grow, the further in you get, and it’s cool the way the second book loops back over events you’ve already been a part of.

…and the not-so-good

Unfortunately, there were few bits of the game I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as the first one. I won’t reveal anything here that’ll spoil the game for you, but I’ll touch on a couple of things. The most annoying thing that happened to me was spending ages working on a puzzle, only for the game to tell me “You shouldn’t have wasted your time doing that, nothing productive happened”. It was like the makers were smirking at me going “OMG can you believe he fell for it!? What a moron”. Luckily I’ve not experienced that same thing since, as it was a big turn-off for me.

Some of the puzzles defied logic a bit. I mean, I know that’s always going to be a bit of lateral thinking and tangential puzzles in an escape room, but there were times when it was a bit too far. One of the puzzles involved a dart board, with darts in certain scores and even using the double and triple ring. I had to take a hint from the app for this one, and it gleefully told me “It’s nothing to do with actual darts or darts scoring”, which frustrated me. Maybe I was just feeling rubbed-up the wrong way after the time-waster puzzle, I don’t know.

Some of the puzzles were hard for the sake of being hard. I love a puzzle, I love logic problems, mystery, thinking laterally. But there were some in here that felt like they were intentionally convoluted. You should be able to play these games with a piece of paper and a pencil, but there were times that felt insufficient. Later in the game there’s a big puzzle, which I did enjoy, but only because I know how a logic grid works, and how to make one. Without that knowledge, I think I’d have been tearing my hair out.

Final thoughts

If you’ve read this far, you’d be forgiven for thinking I didn’t like Low Memory. I can see why, but I want to make the point that it’s not a bad game. Far from it, it’s a good game, with fiendish puzzles, that puzzle fans will love. I’m coming at it from a holistic point of view though, and with an eye on how it fits in with the setting of the game, how the story progresses, and how the puzzles tie-in with that story.

If I’d played this game before I played The Awakening, I’m not sure I’d have been as down on some of the puzzles as I have been. I think playing them in this order spoiled me a bit, because The Awakening was just a bit more cohesive. Some of the puzzles in Low Memory felt like they were maybe ideas that were first thought of when making The Awakening, but got left on the cutting room floor.

It’s a very long game, and that’s neither a positive nor a negative, it just depends if you want a short or long game. The box reckons each of the three stories will take you around three hours, and that’s not far from the truth. If you’re after a brain-melter of an escape room game, Low Memory is a good game. Not a great game, but certainly not a bad one. If you’re fresh to the series, or are coming from the Exit or Unlock series, I’d probably go for The Awakening first, but this is definitely worth picking up at some point to get your puzzle fix.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: Low Memory (2019)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 3 x 180 mins

The post Escape Tales: Low Memory Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that The Awakening is an app-driven game, as the use of technology in games can be pretty divisive. I like the way that Board & Dice and Lockme (the developers) have done it in these games. Instead of an app you need to download from an app store, the game is driven by a mobile-friendly website, masquerading as an app. The reason this is so good is because it means you can use it on anything with a web browser – be that your phone, laptop, or whatever technology you prefer.

Staying spoiler-free

The difficulty when reviewing games like this, is that I can’t really show you much of the game, or tell you too much about the story, as I’ll be spoiling it for you. So I’ll do my best not to reveal anything you couldn’t find out from the box or the website. The backstory for The Awakening puts you in the role of Sam, a man whose daughter is trapped in a coma and deteriorating. You meet a stranger who gives you a book containing a ritual called ‘The Awakening’, but gives you fair warning that your sanity will be tested. That’s where your adventure begins.

Gameplay in The Awakening revolves around cards. Cards for locations, cards for maps, and cards for the objects and puzzles you’ll find while exploring those locations. Each puzzle has a symbol associated with it, and a look at the app tells you how many cards with a matching symbol are necessary to solve it. If you get stuck, there are multiple hints available, before it finally concedes to your apparent stupidity and just tells you the answer. Sometimes you’ll have choices to make which will dramatically affect the direction your story takes and the puzzles you’ll face, and that’s where the replayability comes from – being able to play again and make different choices.

Riddle me this

The puzzles in The Awakening are pretty good, and you’ll need to use a good mix of logic, wordplay, mathematics and lateral thinking needed to solve them. There’s a bit of a disconnect in quite a few of them, because you’ll enter the code in the app, but when you find the location in the book to see what happens, it might say something like “You say the answer and the thing happens”. That’s just because in the story you might not be physically moving or rearranging things, and I guess you need to suspend some disbelief to play.

I’m still torn on whether I think it’s clever, or frustrating that some of the locations you choose to explore have no puzzle associated. Exploring a location means you spend an action token to do it, and when you run out of action tokens you need to draw a card from the Doom pile. That’s not as bad as it might sound, and it’s by design, but the first couple of times you do it, you feel like you’ve failed somehow. It’s actually a pretty clever mechanism, as it’s impossible to complete the game without drawing Doom cards, and it helps drive the narrative that your character is getting deeper and deeper into this situation he’s put himself in.

Final thoughts

There’s not much more I can say about the game without ruining the story, and the twists and turns it takes. The puzzles feel a little shoe-horned in at times, but that’s the nature of games of this ilk. The Exit games do the same thing. The way the story progresses is really good, and when other aspects of Sam’s life come back to haunt him during the game, you’re left with some really difficult choices to make. I found myself drawn into the story far more than I expected to, and I felt myself invested in Sam’s and his daughter’s outcome.

The puzzles are, in the vast majority of cases, good. There were a few which felt very difficult to solve, and even when I used the app to get the answer eventually, I was still none-the-wiser as to why that was the answer. A quick trip to the BGG forums for the game cleared things up for me, but given the number of people struggling on the same things, it might just be a design flaw rather than my broken brain. I think that’s the biggest flaw in The Awakening, the fact that the app will give you the answer if you get really stuck, but it doesn’t explain why. I’d like to see that in future games.

If you like these escape room style games, I think you’ll really enjoy The Awakening. It does things I haven’t seen in other games of this type, and the branching paths, choices, and the ability to replay it really help to justify its £25 price tag. When you consider you’re getting somewhere between three to six hours of game for that, it’s good value. Nothing is destroyed during the game, so you can let a friend play it, or sell it on afterwards. You can also save your game at any point, which is essential in a game this long.

If you like escape rooms and puzzles, and especially if you like the Exit or Unlock games, I’ve no hesitation in recommending Escape Tales: The Awakening.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: The Awakening (2018)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Matt Dembek, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz, Paweł Niziołek
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 180-300 minutes

The post Escape Tales: The Awakening Review appeared first on Punchboard.