For this week’s critical play, I explored the world of Rusty Lake’s Samsara. Samsara is a mystery digital escape room experience that has elements of dimension hopping and prop collection.
The mechanics of Samsara resemble many in its genre. Players go through a series of interconnected puzzles to get to the end of the game. Exploring the “rooms” and collecting found items help move the game along as they can be used to gather information and/or items of utility to reach the next level of the game. This creates a dynamic for this one player game that centers puzzle and problem-solving. These dynamics alongside world creation through narrative, sound, and strong thematic graphic design creates an aesthetic that contributes to Narrative and Challenge as being the main types of fun.
Samsara was a really captivating game to play. It was an especially interesting game to explore Loops and Arcs Game Architecture theory through as, after learning about it in Daniel Cook’s article, I could not unsee the way Loops were structured into this game and so important for my progression in the game. Samsara opens, like many games in its genre, with an unexplored and neatly packed setting. The player starts the outlined interaction loop by bringing in their mental model of escape rooms (i.e. I must discover things). This leads to decisions about starting to click on things as a pathway to discovery and finding something, leading to the action of doing such. The act of clicking on one item or the other is a form of the player learning where the game rules are in place or could be manipulated, and the game’s response to those clicks (an item or drawer pops out or not) is the feedback that gives players information to progress.
I definitely noticed this as I began my journey in this game. Moving through the above mentioned interaction loop lead me to discovering that the game would be played through collecting and utilizing items. When I realized multiples of an item were being discovered (such as a candle), and that the amount synced with how many candle holders were in a component of the game, it gave me more information about a feedback loop of the game. This tied well into a narrative arc of the game: The window with four object place holders and a plate in the middle was a portal to different dimensions that a player would need to hop back and forth through to move through the game. Anytime I unlocked a new dimension, I immediately started to look for the items that would come in multiples of four that would be placed at this window “alter”; in one dimension its candles, another its feathers, another its marbles, and the list goes on. Other examples of learning that came through a feedback loops as I progressed through the game was the use of clues that indicate time to turn the hands of clocks, the use of a knife to cut anything that had a seem in it, the use of the four elements that sit at the middle of the altar (fish, heart, lizzard, and worm) as encodings that show up everywhere, and the overall element of collecting items in one dimension to be used in another dimension to unlock more of the game.
One thing I think Samsara lacked was a clearly learnable Narrative Arc. I was able to get through the entire game without knowing the intended story. I knew that in essence, I have just woken up into a strange room and I needed to navigate the game world to figure out the mystery of where I am. But the overall storyline never really unfolded as I moved through the game. The descriptions maintain a level of mystic that could benefit from some clarity. The game ends with a fetus being burped out of a stork and, once placed at the alter, the fetus is reunited with the image of a woman. It was moving, but I was not sure what I concluded.
Still, it felt rewarding to complete the game. I enjoyed Samsara as a wonderful example of an online mystery escape room experience.
