Critical Play – Mysteries and Escape Rooms – Cube Escape Paradox – Andreas

For my critical play this week, I ended up playing Cube Escape Paradox. It’s a game developed by Rusty Lake and it’s available on Steam for Windows and Mac. The target audience is probably young adults and up for two reasons: 1) its a bit freaky and 2) it is quite a complicated escape room/mystery to solve. I played for over an hour and did not manage to escape the first room (maybe I’m just bad at these games…).

I think narrative is woven into this game by the fact that in the process of escaping the room, we are learning who our main character (Detective Vandermeer) is and how he ended up there. There is a constant mystery to be solved and as pieces of the puzzle get revealed, we get a clearer and clearer picture of what the narrative is. This is very much an enacted story, where the narrative is revealed through the gameplay.

As far as how the architecture controls/informs the story, there are a couple of things that come to mind. First of all, the whole game is built on pressing arrows to move from room to room and then pressing objects in the rooms to inspect and interact with them. You collect items that you can use in other parts of the room to further figure out what’s going on. This game mechanic was super frustrating, as I felt like I was constrained very heavily and couldn’t move freely. I think this ties into the narrative very strongly, as the main character we are playing is stuck in this room and he doesn’t know why. In addition to this, the setting we are in is a sort of dreary, creepy, archaic hotel/mental facility of sorts. In many ways, this architecture and game mechanic mirrors the character’s fate/circumstances.

Overall, despite uncovering clues and progressing, I felt completely stuck in this game, which might have been the developers intent all along. That being said, there was enough progression as well as enough different kinds of puzzles that I kept wanting to play more and figure the whole thing out.

A couple of reflections on individual parts:

1. I had no idea how to use a dial up phone and had to look that up in order to solve the phone clue.
2. The lack of any kind of guide or steps made for a super steep learning curve, but I also really liked having to figure things out on the spot
3. This game’s main kind of fun (at least to me) was the challenge component. Although there were touches of narrative and discovery, I personally found myself caring less about the narrative and discovering what was going on than I did about actually solving the puzzles. I found the game to be quite hard and I really liked that.
4. The stage where we end up in the main characters head was fun and interesting, but also moved a little slow, leading to me losing a bit of interest. It was actually this moment that I stopped playing the game and started writing this post, because it just felt like it would take too long to try and get through all of it. There were other moments that felt the same:
   1. Sorting through the catalogs/folders to find the authors of the books
   2. General movement around the space
   3. Having to read/listen/type things took a lot of time.

I did really enjoy this game, but parts of it were too challenging/slow, which led to me losing some of my interest at times.

Photo of where I decided to stop (we are inside our character’s head) because it was taking too long and the act of moving from room to room was really tedious.