NOX – Escape Games is an iOS/Android escape room adventure created by Everbyte, intended for anyone who’s looking to play a good escape room game embedded with a mysterious and sad narrative. The protagonist wakes up in an empty cage, confused about their whereabouts. From the get go, I could tell that NOX would have an embedded narrative, woven into the game through the protagonist’s monologue as they made personalized comments about new rooms and acquired objects:
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The player’s goal is to escape while at the same time learning more about the mystery that is the protagonist and the mansion that they are trapped in. To do this, I utilized the main mechanic of the game: clicking on the game’s main resources, objects, to learn if they’re interactive. This mechanic of clicking created the dynamic of entering a room, clicking on everything you can find, and reading the protagonist’s monologue about the clicked on object to learn if it’s useful. I’d argue that this dynamic is the game’s principal interaction loop, as I quickly learned that the only way to make progress toward escaping was by interacting with everything and reading the protagonist’s monologue. Every new piece of monologue led me closer to the truth.
An especially interesting mechanic was that of clicking on objects that are encased in a glass box. These items were obviously special and important to the narrative, because they’d result in a popup unique to most other objects in the game. This is what happened when I clicked on the bear in glass:
Most other objects don’t trigger a memory from the protagonist like this. Isn’t it interesting how Teddy, the protagonist’s best friend, was sitting in the mansion that the protagonist is trying to escape from?
And as I explored more and more rooms, I learned that there’s an uncanny amount of items familiar to the protagonist in this mansion. Putting together all of one’s findings from the interaction loop of learning about objects through monologue, the player begins to infer that none of this is random. This leads us to the underlying arc of the game. The protagonist is reliving their childhood trauma in their childhood home, which is explicitly revealed in the arc at the end of the game in which the protagonist has an extended monologue with themself, realizing that this is a memory. This final arc was continuously hinted at throughout the game by the protagonist’s monologue but is finally confirmed and explained at the end.
Just as a good embedded narrative should, NOX allows the player to uncover the mystery and reconstruct the game’s narrative using the body of information they collect throughout the game, mostly in the form of objects and textual monologue.
