Escape Room: The Game 2 Review

The first thing you have to know about Escape Room: The Game 2 is that, like its predecessor, you get a huge and slightly noisy bit of plastic in the box. This is the decoder that is going to sit as a hub of anxiety for your group over the next 60 minutes. It’s a timer, it’s where you slot the correct keys to escape, and it’s also covered in clues and cyphers to help you solve the puzzles in your way of escaping. It’s also going to buzz at you and take away a minute every time you get a key wrong and make ambient ‘tension noises’ throughout. It’s surprisingly effective as a way of piling on the pressure.

This Escape Room: The Game outing comes with three ‘rooms’ on the themes of the doomed voyage of the Titanic (I hope this isn’t a spoiler), Alice in Wonderland, and a Romero nod in ‘Dawn of Zombies’. You’ll be given four puzzles at once, to solve together, or in split groups more likely for efficiency, with occasional exasperated switching. 

The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag of decoding, routing, and sometimes, squinting at the keys to work out if the jagged edge matches the one you think is the solution. This can be a little frustrating, as can the seemingly brick wall of some of the puzzles, but most groups will get over the hurdles happily. While it’s not as elegantly lateral thinking laden as something like the Unlock! series, or Detective, it offers straightforwardly frantic puzzling and just the right amount of panic. 

Christopher John Eggett

PLAY IT? YES

Designer: Uncredited

Publisher: Goliath Games

Time: 60 minutes

Players: 3-5

Ages: 16+

Price: £30

This article originally appeared in issue 56 of Tabletop Gaming. Pick up the latest issue of the UK's fastest-growing gaming magazine in print or digital here or subscribe to make sure you never miss another issue.

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