The Awakening

Some clever puzzles but overall the mechanics and the story are just make it hard to recommend. The mechanics punish exploration which is necessary to play the game and also part of the puzzle solving experience.

➕Puzzles are logical and varied. Lots of the puzzles required logical thinking and took a while to solve. The puzzles were all different as well and did not feel repetitive. ➕Easy to reset and pass it on. Nothing is torn or written on so you can easily repack it and pass it to someone else. ➖Puzzle difficulties fluctuates. Some puzzles were simple to solve while others were difficult and required me to look up the hints or solutions. ✖️Puzzles did not capture the Escape Room experience. Many of the puzzles did not require lateral thinking or thinking outside of the box that you would need from an actual escape room. I had some fun playing this and if you managed to get it for cheap then I would recommend it. While the puzzles weren't really the type I enjoy, I can see those who heavily enjoy logical puzzles getting a lot of satisfaction from playing this.

I’ve actually played this twice to try to get different endings. It’s a pretty fun choose your own adventure, point-and-click style board/card game. I liked the narrative beats and found it spooky at times. For puzzles, you use cards and an app to provide answers and possibly get items. The puzzles are very interesting, though I wish there was an easier way (besides using hints) to know whether you had enough cards to complete a riddle. The game is pretty long, depending on how much time you take to get through each area. Like, 5-6 hours long. It’s replayable, though, as you can make different decisions for alternate outcomes. There’s an annoying “limit” to how much you can search, which made exploration more of a pain than it should be in a board game experience.