Though I’m a big fan of physical escape rooms, I haven’t been too often because it’s pricy and sometimes difficult to find a big group to go with. So I was really excited to play Tiny Room Story Town Mystery made by Kiary Games, which is available on iOS, Android, and Desktop via Steam. Given that the main mechanic is puzzles, some of which can be quite complicated, this game may not be suitable for a younger audience that’s under 10. Instead, because of the emphasis on exploration, brain teasers, and uncovering the story, this would appeal to an audience that enjoys playing mentally-stimulating games situated in an intricate world with rich narratives.
In Tiny Room Story Town Mystery, we play as a male detective who gets a letter from his father asking for help and returns to his hometown to figure out what’s going on. Through world engagement and exploration, as well as puzzles that blend in as parts of the setting, we gradually piece together the narrative by revealing clues that uncover the mystery. In my playthrough, I managed to visit four locations — the road to the city, the father’s house, the bank, and the church. As information is the key resource that players obtain in order to achieve the goal of uncovering the mystery, the developers utilized different ways of obtaining and presenting the information, which often made sense of the setting at the time. For example, as I was exploring the church and completed puzzles, I collected candles that later became used to unlock a key to a chest containing a locked box. This mechanic of “unlocking” hints with strategery and resources is crucial to progressing in the game and creates incentives for players to explore thoroughly, returning to rooms as needed to make sure details aren’t missed. Another example is the Bank where there was a large clock on the wall with the saying ‘Time is Money” that was actually a puzzle. To learn how to arrange the clock arms, I had to go to the bathroom and turn on the sink until the mirror fogged up and revealed the pattern.
As a result of this dynamic, players are able to experience discovery, narrative, and abnegation by immersing themselves in the world and uncovering the mystery. The fact that each setting is so distinctly different from each other make them abundant with their own setting-specific details that provides players with multifaceted discovery. At the end of each setting, there is usually another clue that connects us to the next setting, creating loosely created pieces of the narrative that come together gradually. Through these micronarratives facilitated by the different settings, the overall narrative becomes richer and more engaging.
In addition, to create convincing settings, there are a lot of things that function as props in scenes such as scattered documents, trash, and rotten fruit. To help players determine what’s a resource and what’s not, some of these props have dialogue that mark them as not explorable. This is something that I think virtual escape rooms do better than physical escape rooms. Often times, in physical escape rooms, I fixate on something that ends up just being decoration and the employee has to verbally give me a hint to redirect me back to the right path. The game effectively creates convincing settings that are not too cluttered and explorable by delineating clear boundaries of interactions for objects.
I first want to acknowledge the game’s accessbility in regard to it being free to play and available in more than 10 languages. Physical escape rooms are so fun but can be inaccessible because of anxiety, mobility issues, and lack of space/money/people to go with. Being able to transform that gaming experience into something that you can play and pause anytime as long as you have a device makes escape rooms much more accessible to a greater audience. However, because the world exploration is no longer done physically and tactily, it can pose significant difficulties for players with visual impairments. Throughout the game, I noticed some puzzles that relied on different colors, specifically red and green. For people with color deficiencies, this information could be easily lost. Fortunately, this was mostly mitigated by the puzzle pieces having additional distinguishing factors beyond red and green. Because there are different types of color deficiencies, I think the authors managed to find a good workaround that mostly preserves the gaming experiences for those with color deficiencies.
Because I don’t use a screen reader, I can’t comment on whether the game is screen-reader friendly. But I do suspect that it’s not because in general even beyond games, graphs and diagrams tend to be not screen-reader friendly at all. Because of the sheer size of the world, I imagine that it would take a lot of time and resources to come up with descriptions that can be read by a screen reader, but I do feel like this is one possible feature that the developers can work on. If technology like Be My Eyes can describe physical environments in real time, we have the technology to describe smaller, contained environments in games.
