Escape Tales: The Awakening Review

You’re trapped. An impenetrable puzzle lies before you. A choice. But which do you choose? The exit? To… unlock? But wait! Perhaps there’s a new choice! A new page to turn. Escape Tales: The Awakening.

This review features images from cards in the first, tutorial room of the game. There is also one, clearly labelled paragraph discussing the end of the game which doesn’t go into specifics but might bother some readers. Skip over it when you see the Spoiler Warning image.

Escape Tales

Players: 1-4
Time: 180-300 mins
Age: 12+
Designer: Jakub Caban, Matt Dembek, Bartosz Idzikowski
Artist: Magdalena Klepacz, Paweł Niziołek
Publisher: Board&Dice


The tremendous rise of the Escape Room in-a-box genre has been dominated by two game series: Exit and Unlock, each with their own quirks and nuances. Unlock with its app and hidden numbers, Exit with its key dial and destructible puzzles. To stand out in a market dominated by these two colossus (they now have 20+ sets between them) requires something novel, something special. Something that makes you peek through its multi-combination locked door and say, yes, I want to be locked in this room! Enter Escape Tales: The Awakening.

Escape Tales Cards

Escape Tales falls closer to Unlock, in that it has an app for checking puzzle solutions, a big deck of numbered cards to search through, and doesn’t require you to destroy any components, but ends up in a very different place thanks to its central conceit: it is story driven! Of course, all escape rooms have a ‘story’ in much the same way that all supermarket wines have tasting notes. To make you think there’s something more to the core experience of getting hopelessly drunk… on puzzles!

Escape Tales, though, presents a truly motivating story that, through some fantastical sleight of hand, puts you in a world in which the insane density of puzzles can and does make an acceptable sense. Your daughter has fallen into a mysterious coma, baffling doctors, and your only hope being a book and ritual to take you into a kind of dream world. Here the designers are free to fill room after room with puzzles in a way that doesn’t lead to those typical immersion breaking questions or genre tropes. Not a crazed scientist or ancient tomb in sight. Even the kind of tutorial room in your basement is presented in a sufficiently reasonable way for you to suspend disbelief.

Escape Tales play area

And this is a long experience! Far from the 1 hour and done gameplay of its predecessors, Escape Tales will take you at best 3 hours and probably considerably more. To make such an experience practical it has a perfectly effective save system and a very different approach to loss and victory. It isn’t a race against a clock. Instead you have a set of action tokens available that are spent as you investigate the rooms you will find yourself in. The more actions you spend exploring rooms, though, the worse your situation will be at game end. There is an element of being efficient and not visiting every spot in every room, but it is not so strict that you’ll be punished heavily for exploring.

Excitingly, this means you can spend as much meat-space time as you like figuring out a puzzle, and the app will not punish you if you make a mistake, as Unlock infuriatingly does. It also doesn’t track how many hints you ask for, letting you decide how hard you want to fight over puzzles and let you set the criteria for your own enjoyment. It’s a nice change to the accepted formula!

This in turn allows the designers to come up with some truly devious puzzles and, my word, do they pursue the torturing and twisting of your mind with enthusiastic abandon! Let’s not dupe ourselves here, these puzzles are not for casual players. I’d dare to say that players new to escape rooms should go play some Exits first. But those looking for an epic challenge are in for a treat! The pseudo-tutorial room is far from easy, and the puzzles only ramp up in difficulty and, in many ways, absurdity, as the rooms go on. It feels like a well crafted escalation in challenge as you dig further into the dream.

Escape Tales Story

Tell me a story

Escape Tales gleefully describes itself as a story driven escape room game and it is absolutely true that they have put far more effort than most games into creating a great scenario. The set up is fantastic. Then, almost every action you do in game will have you leafing through the story book to find the paragraph either the app or cards will have instructed you to read. There you’ll find a little snippet of story, describing the objects you find and their significance to the mystery, before it switches into mechanical functionality mode and instructs you to draw some cards from the deck. Mechanically it works fantastically well, providing an extremely effective interface between location images, the explore/action limit system and the card deck. But what about story?

Well, here I felt the game falls short of what was promised, and certainly short of what it could have been. While many of the paragraphs add context to the items you find, explaining the significance of them to you, your daughter, or your deceased wife, it falls into the same trap so many supposed ‘story driven’ board games fall into: flavour is NOT story. Story requires growth and change. To be ‘story driven’ requires story development throughout, so that you don’t want to stop. Anyone with a Netflix account knows how this works!

Escape Tales paragraphs

While Escape Tales has a great set up, it fails to build on that through the first few rooms. Getting yet another description of how you remember your daughter sat on this chair is flavourful, but it has no narrative implication. It’s just a chair. Maybe it is involved in a puzzle. But the puzzles are purely obstacles in the way of advancement, or gates separating you from items that might be useful later. They have no relevance to any narrative and neither do the, as written, flavour connections to your daughter. You learn many things, but none of the things your learn are of any consequence to accomplishing, or failing, your goals.

Of course, we wanted to know the conclusion, and for that reason we continued to fight through the puzzles. To that extent it is story driven. But this is a long, hard game and I feel like the ‘story’, such as it is, is not the reason to play. And I feel like that is a real shame because the creators have here something really quite interesting! There are one or two revelations that I don’t want to spoil that are genuinely quite good but there is little build up to them. It is more like the writers create a question and then, once you’ve solved enough unconnected puzzles, they reveal the answer. The mysterious Keepers, the denizens of the dream world, could, and should, have played a larger role as the opponents of your character. A better appreciation of storytelling, particularly pacing, could have made this spectacular.

Escape Tales choice

Take the decision cards. At various points throughout play, you will come across decision cards that force upon you a permanent choice. These are hardly new in board gaming – see Gloomhaven, or Dead of Winter, or various other thematic games. And again, these have the same issue as you find in those. There is no way for you to evaluate which option you should take, rendering the choice more or less meaningless. And because of this you do not feel like an active protagonist in this adventure. A better implementation would foreshadow these decisions better, providing a more satisfying experience. This is brought to a head at the end of the game.

Skip the next paragraph if you are in any way bothered by spoilers. I don’t go into details, but I appreciate some people prefer to know as little as possible.

Escape tales Spoiler alert

The final conclusion to the adventure is ultimately determined by a choice of this sort, although far broader in scope. There are numerous different endings, and while there is a logic of sorts to what ending you get, you can only appreciate that in hindsight. There was no clear establishment of the rules to which the conclusion would adhere and while the results are darkly humorous and wonderfully evocative, I did not feel like I had any basis for making that decision. And that is ultimately unsatisfying.

Spoiler alert over

This choice system was implied to me to lead to a degree of replayability. That different locations and puzzles would be accessed by choosing different options. That is true, but to a far more limited degree than I had expected. In the end there was only one location we didn’t visit, and maybe half a dozen puzzles we didn’t solve. This was a little disappointing, as I have no plans to replay this now to get a different result, I’ve seen way too much of it. But given the game is less than the cost of two Exits and provides a fair bit more puzzle I am certainly not going to hold that against it! It is still absolutely worth your money!

Now, I have spent a considerable amount of time being critical about Escape Tales: The Awakening. You may think that I am disappointed in it. I do think it could have been better, but that is because I wanted it to be spectacular. As it is, it is just very good. It has shot for something far greater than the baseline set by the Exit and Unlock series and most of my criticism is because it falls short of what a properly story driven adventure could be. But I whole heartedly applaud it for making that attempt! It is experiments like this that make playing (and reviewing!) games such a joy.

The absolute worst I can say about Escape Tales: The Awakening is that it is as enjoyable a set of puzzles as an Exit or an Unlock, but probably better value than either. I absolutely enjoy it more than Unlock (I hated that app). Then it also places itself in a more interesting and believable setting. The length, and challenge of some of the puzzles, makes this a little less accessible, and potentially more frustrating, than Exit. But since the mechanics of the game and its puzzles are so well constructed, this is an easy game to recommend for serious escape room and puzzle fans. I want to see more games try this!

Wow. Was that a twist ending?

 

Rating: Awakening Tales


My copy of Escape Tales: The Awakening was provided by the publisher Board & Dice. Escape Tales will be available to by at and soon after Essen, and Board & Dice have a pre-order open here if you are interested!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.