[Image courtesy of Yelp.]

Unfortunately, the ongoing global crisis is preventing a lot of people from feeling safe while engaging in communal puzzly events. While crossword tournaments (and events like the upcoming Boswords 2020 Fall Themeless League) have adapted to the online and remote-play spheres, escape rooms haven’t been so lucky.

Sure, some have reopened during this difficult time — and anyone familiar with escape rooms was probably using a fair amount of hand sanitizer to begin with, even before all this! — but there’s no doubt that the industry has taken a hit.

Some escape rooms have adapted, hosting virtual escape room experiences on Zoom and other platforms, and I’ve heard good things about those communal play experiences.

But there are other ways to harness that escape room-style solving vibe for yourself from the comfort of your own home. Today, we’re going to look at a few options.

Escape Room Apps

While The Room is probably the benchmark series for escape room apps, there is a vast world of escape room-inspired apps available for both iPhone and Android users.

A casual glance at each brand’s offerings give solvers a host of intriguing choices. Names like Forever Lost, RealMyst, Agent A, The Birdcage, All That Remains, Adventure Escape, House of Da Vinci, Rusty Lake, War Escape, Cube Escape, and Spotlight hint at hugely different solving experiences.

Some are point-and-click-style explorations of a space, ranging from a series of doorways to vast multi-room affairs loaded with secrets to uncover with the touch of a finger. Others, like our own Wordventures: The Vampire Pirate, give you an entire town to explore!

Some go beyond point-and-click, letting you actually manipulate objects, twisting knobs to open doors, spinning wheels on combination locks, moving puzzle pieces into place, and more.

And the different narratives behind each are virtually limitless. You might be a prisoner concealing your efforts to escape from the guards, or a bird trying to free yourself from your cage, or a person onboard the sinking Titanic, or a secret agent pursuing your nemesis.

For a relatively low price — or sometimes even free (with the occasional ad) — there are plenty of options available right in your pocket.

Escape Room Books

These come in all shapes and sizes, and can be delivered right to your door.

Some are constructed like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, allowing you to make different choices and explore the outcomes, both good and bad, resulting from your decisions.

Others are built like labyrinths to be explored and unraveled. A good example would be Brad Hough’s The Maze series, which offers a first-person perspective on labyrinths, as if you’re actually wandering into each room and new area.

Still others are page-by-page progressions, full of puzzles and wordplay that require you to solve certain challenges before you can proceed forward.

Each of these offer the sort of sequential chain-solving that escape room devotees look for. You can make choices, solve puzzles, and move forward in the narrative toward the next challenge!

[Image courtesy of I Googled Israel.]

Escape Room Audio

Yes, you can even solve interactive audio versions of escape rooms now! My sister showed me this recently — utilizing the voice-activated Alexa feature on her phone — and I’ve tackled several different scenarios.

It plays like an old text adventure game, where you give the game vocal commands and it responds with information. For instance, you can tell it to look left, look right, look up, look down, or look at a particular object, and it will tell you what you see.

As you build a visual idea in your mind of what the room and its contents look like, you must find useful items, crack codes, solve puzzles, and escape!

The quality of these can vary by setting; for the most part, they’re competently assembled and feature puzzles that wouldn’t feel out of place in a real escape room. (One of them, though, had a solution so nonsensical and wacky that I couldn’t believe THAT was the correct solution. As always, your mileage may vary.)

Do you have any other suggestions for escape room-style solving from home, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

And remember, we’re continuing this discussion on Thursday with a look at two of the top at-home escape room game brands on the market today, Unlock! and Exit: The Game, before reviewing ThinkFun’s new 3-D escape room puzzle game The Cursed Dollhouse on Friday!

Stay tuned, and happy puzzling!

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