For this critical play, I used Steam to play Cube Escape: Paradox designed by Rusty Lake. This game is intended for anyone who is interested in escape rooms, puzzles, or mysteries. By using the mechanics of the typewriter, the designers embedded a lot of narrative and mystery of the game in those mechanics. Furthermore, the architecture of the room controls the pace and setting of the story by specifying your focus.
The typewriter as a mechanic only accepts words and phrases the player has already discovered in the game environment itself and then gives you an additional clue. For example, typing the clue “the lake” into the typewriter generates another sheet that you have to cut up in order to generate a phone number you are supposed to call. Throughout the game, there are many puzzles and clues that you have to put into the typewriter to generate the next chapter of the story. In this way, the game’s embedded narrative is built from the story fragments hidden in the environment of the game, waiting for the player to discover them. Each typed word unearths a bit of the mystery and reveals some more clues as to what happened in the past, so the typewriter is quite literally printing the next chapter of the plot. Furthermore, the mechanic builds the narrative of the story because the typewriter doesn’t do anything until the correct word is found. I was forced to scour through all the objects in the room to unearth the correct clue, which reinforces my role as a detective uncovering the mystery of the story by examining clues in the room. This is a common design with other mechanics in the game like the rotary telephone as well. In this way, the narrative and mystery are inextricably linked by the act of uncovering the mysteries of the room in order to advance the narrative of the story.
The Paradox Room itself is also a tightly choreographed spatial narrative. The four different walls all function as narrative coordinates. Each time I retrieved a clue like a typed-out word or a dialled phone number, I had to pivot to the next wall, submit the clue, and then pivot back to see what my clue changed in the room. The architecture of this change like the clock hands changing or the drawer opening gives the room a sense of structure and grounds the mystery and the narrative in a more physical realm. This is what Jenkin referred to as spatial storytelling, where the layout facilitates plot progression through the physical relationship of the objects. Forcing the player to click through the walls of the room ensures that the player will notice the changes in the objects and architecture of the environment. Furthermore, since each person’s progression of examining the walls and objects of the room is different, each game played produces a slightly different experience and emergent narrative.
The game doesn’t have any accessibility features for people with disabilities that I could see. The first is that some of the colour palettes of the paintings and puzzles were not tested to be colour blind friendly. In fact, on an online blog a colour blind player commented that they specifically had issues with a specific part of another game in the series called Arles, and the developers even acknowledged this shortcoming.
Other potential problems include a reliance on audio feedback to guide you through some of the puzzles. Even though the puzzles are still doable with pure visual hints, they are much more difficult without the audio feedback. There are also potential struggles with cognitive disabilities. The game relies heavily on memory recall and sometimes requires the player to remember clues that are used much later on, which could be extremely difficult for players with cognitive disabilities.
