Print, Play, and Solve With Escape Team: An At-Home Escape Experience

Escape Team is an escape room game that is played with an app and printable PDF files. While the app tracks the time and verifies your solutions to the puzzles, the papers you print provide the actual puzzles for you to solve.

The tutorial and first mission are free to play, with eight more missions available to purchase.

Gameplay

To prepare the game, you print out the files needed to play. Each mission will tell you if you need any additional materials such as pens, paper, or scissors. You then launch the mission in the app. There will be an opening audio narration to set up the story, as well as music for ambiance (you can turn it off if you choose).

When the game starts, the timer begins to run down. Each mission will tell you both the difficulty and how long the timer is set for.

Each puzzle requires a five-digit code that you input into the app, and you must solve the puzzles in order. The longer you spend on a particular puzzle, the more hints will be unlocked for that puzzle (you may choose whether to look at them or not). If you input an incorrect code, there is a slight time penalty. When you solve a puzzle, there will typically be more narration to continue the story. To solve the puzzles, you will use the papers you printed at the start. It is recommended that you spread out all the papers while playing so you can see everything as you work.

If you run out of time, the game will play a little audio clip, but then you can choose to continue. When you solve the last puzzle, thereby completing the mission, you will hear a victory speech (whether you finish before the timer ends or not).

Review

Escape Team doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that escape rooms in a box normally come with, but consequently, the mission packs can afford to be cheaper and offer more gameplay. You don’t have the fancy components but the puzzles are still engaging, and there are still clever ideas here.

There is a storyline spread over the missions, which is a fun idea that adds a little extra engagement as you play through them — but it’s really not necessary for enjoying these escape games, and the missions are a nice bite-sized casual length (at the time of writing this review, the longest official mission is forty minutes).

Another strength of Escape Team is the ability to play these on video chat with your friends. Having the app right there, with its audio, does add thematically to the experience and we enjoyed the ambiance it provided, but since you don’t need to purchase a mission to print the files needed to play, only one player actually needs to have the mission with them, which is a nice touch.

Even if playing all together in the same room, we would still recommend printing out at least one extra copy of the files, in case you make any mistakes. Also, while you do have to key in the answers to the puzzles in a specific order, you don’t need information from one puzzle to solve another, so different players can be working on different puzzles at the same time. This is even easier to do if you have multiple copies of each page on hand.

The app itself could use a pause button, and sometimes you’re waiting around for the next hint to unlock. We liked the fact that the hints were written to thematically fit the story but would have preferred to be able to choose when to access the next one. Since the app can’t track how far you’ve progressed in solving a specific puzzle, the hint that unlocks might not actually be helpful. However, it is a nice touch that even if you run out of time you can still continue on and complete the mission and receive the victory speech that accompanies it.

There is an additional clever touch with this app, in that it supports user-created missions as well the official ones. There are several that users have made available to play, and you can also keep your missions private and share them with your friends.

If you’re looking for fancy components or pretty artwork, Escape Team isn’t going to be for you, but it’s got solid puzzles that fit into a playtime that doesn’t run too long, the app works well, and it’s easy to play with friends remotely.

Pros: Can easily be played over video chat, short playtime, players can work on different puzzles simultaneously

Cons: The simple aesthetics may turn off some players, can’t pause the timer, app determines when you unlock new hints

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.