Nox’s Arcs and Loops
I played Nox Escape Adventure by Everbyte for audiences aged 12+, on iOS. The game combines puzzles, secrets, and escape rooms to put players’ investigation skills to the test.
Nox employs an embedded narrative, in which the game designers have already decided the story the player will experience, and the settings in which they find themselves. The developers of Nox use several interaction loops and one main arc in order to slowly unravel the contents of the mystery they’ve packaged into tiny escape rooms.
I would say that the main plot, i.e. why you start off in a cell and must move through rooms to find clues as to how you got there and how to get out, constitute the main arc in Nox. The main functionality of the arc arises from the dialogue that the player steps through, which is often triggered when picking up an item in the room. The dialogue helps deliver the evocative content and preprocessed information that the game designer embedded into the platform. This arc isn’t repeated in the game, but instead linearly progresses with the player’s pace.
One main interaction loop is touching items to discover their in-game significance. As a player, I went into the game with a simple mental model. Every item in the room looked like it could be a clue, so I tried touching all items in the room. It took me a while to update my mental model so that I could play the game more efficiently, but I realized that many items are there merely to support the narrative. The main points of dialogue throughout the mystery game are when the player thinks aloud, and their thoughts are displayed on screen to click through. Though many of these thoughts were helpful to the actual person playing the game in understanding what was happening, some points of dialogue were moments of comedic relief, that don’t help the player to reveal the mystery. I had to update my mental model to focus on the clues that did serve a purpose, in case I might need to refer to them later in the game. This was much easier said than done. I often had to repeat some of my interactions in previous rooms (i.e. touch items I’d already seen) to remind myself of what I was looking for in another room. For example, in one room, there was a vase, and tipping it over allowed me to collect a ball of yarn in my inventory. This led me to to stitching together a pattern in a different room, so that I could access another clue. Though the main mechanic, touching the screen, was very simple, the contribution it made to the overall mystery was far from simple. It contributed to the mystery of the game because there was nothing more than touching to interact with the game. There were no hints, no arrows, no ray of light shining around items that would lead the player to a clue that’d help solve the mystery. They had to figure out themselves what was significant, and what wasn’t.
Another interesting interaction loop within the game is the mechanic of rotating the camera angle 180 degrees. There are two different camera angles from which the player can scan the room. This contributed to the overall mystery because often, these new angles will show you new clues or a door to another room. For example, there were a few times in which solving a puzzle in one corner of the room triggered another clue to show up on my screen once I rotated the camera angle. This felt significant to the narrative because there’s more surface area to scan for clues, and adds to the complexity of the game. Players need to be clever about which doors they go through (often, there were doors on either side of the room, and even more when you rotated the camera angle) because a single room can look so different depending on the camera angle from which you view it.
The last interaction loop I found to be crucial to the overall mystery narrative is the inventory mechanic. Examining the contents of your inventory is simple — you simply have to click on a briefcase at the bottom of your screen. The inventory contributes to the mystery of the game because many items aren’t used immediately. You’ll collect a variety of items which seem random and insignificant in the moment, but later can be used in conjunction, or applied to locks on doors, for example. The inventory serves as a playground to solve mini puzzles in itself. It’s also a great reminder of what the player should be looking for (e.g. if a key is in one’s inventory, the player should be looking for the particular door to use the key on).
Points of frustration + my suggested improvements
Despite feeling eager to find clues and uncover mysteries, after about two hours I felt stuck. Though I wouldn’t change how the game starts, I do think there needs to be a balance between Challenge and Discovery such that the player stays engaged throughout the entire game. I think the game should incorporate more explicit hints. Making the game too difficult makes the gameplay feel imbalanced, and takes away from the fun. To accomplish this, I think there should be clearer signs or hints for when a player can flip an item upside down, or through which door the player should go through. For example, it was difficult to distinguish which items in my inventory I could rotate or flip upside down in case there was another mystery item hidden inside of it. In the case of the second room I got to, it took me a while to find the screwdriver inside a wooden crate. I felt like I was randomly clicking, devoid of any purpose or strategy. There should be some sort of highlight or some way to indicate when things are able to be moved around and what isn’t. In addition, I think the ability to rotate camera angles is a wonderful mechanic in the game, but is almost too confusing. I liked how the developers of the game focused on one room at a time, but there were often 2-3 doors in each room that I often went in circles trying to get to the children’s play room or the basement, for example. Being more explicit about hinting towards which direction the player should progress would make it more likely for them to experience more moments of Discovery.
Next, some of the puzzles felt random and insignificant to the overall narrative and outcome of the game. For example, one game I had to play felt reminiscent of Flappy Bird and Battleship, in that I had to navigate my way through a bunch of tiny robots which shot bullets towards my character. Though successfully making it out alive led me to another hint which was helpful to the overall mystery, the game itself felt insignificant. Ensuring that each puzzle and game ties in to the underlying narrative makes it likelier that the player will stay engaged and immersed in the narrative, and more determined to figure out the story.
