For this week’s critical play, I played EXIT – The House of Riddles at game night. Created by Inka and Markus Brand, the game is a physical tabletop game intended for puzzle and escape room lovers. I first thought that EXIT: The House of Riddles appeared to be a simple escape room game in a box, and we chose to play it because it seemed like the simplest one. But as I played, it became clear that it’s actually pretty complicated, and the complexities lie in its puzzle mechanics. Unlike digital games, where mechanics are often reinforced by visuals or UI elements, EXIT’s mechanics rely on a card spinning wheel and abstract visual logic to pull players into a narrative puzzle experience. As the Designing the Puzzle reading, good puzzles should “enhance the game rather than detract from it.” EXIT achieves this by making the act of solving not just a means to an end, but a narrative device itself. For example, the game makes us travel through different rooms and clues related to the narrative (the first card says the names of three detectives, and we traced their names to find the first code). The final puzzle is usually a simple number combination. This could easily feel flat, but the game wraps these answers in enough indirection to keep us engaged. In one moment, we realized the numbers were embedded in the picture frames on a wall we’d overlooked for 10 minutes. That realization is the kind of “aha” moment that we talked about, and what made the game satisfying and addictive. For me, it came as a surprise that I was having so much fun since I usually don’t enjoy logic games.
The picture wall
However, I also realized one flaw when I played EXIT that I saw in the game I played last week. EXIT lacked a formal hint system, which can happen as the puzzles progressively get harder. This goes with the “designer puzzle”, which makes sense only in the creator’s head. Without some form of player support, hints, narrative nudges, and environmental guidance, stumbling can turn into stalling. For our game, I think making the hints a crucial part of our game, as well as maybe incorporating them into our digital element. This week, we read that puzzles are “fun, and with a right answer.” This is what I like about EXIT: it incorporates humour into the game. For example, one challenge was making the three-digit numbers with our bodies through a fitness challenge. Another moment was when we scanned the QR code on the page, but it was a trick, which I thought was quite clever.
The fitness puzzle & my friend Mark making a 2?
However, another moment of frustration with the game was how we discovered the answer was right. We would have to spin a spinning wheel with the number and get a number that corresponds to what card we should turn to find out if it’s right, and then we have to match the image of the page to find the right answer. I thought this was quite annoying, but it also comes with a physical escape room. After playing this, we thought it would be a good opportunity for players to enter the code or the answer on our digital platform to ease the player experience. That said, the physical manipulation in EXIT has a strong toy-like quality that is fun to touch, fold, and test theories in real-time. Even when we didn’t immediately solve a puzzle, just handling the components offered a form of play that digital puzzles often lack. That’s something we should translate into a digital experience too, creating interactions that feel exploratory even before the solution is reached.
The answer reveal mechanics
One more thing I enjoyed about this game was the collaborative aspect. While you can play solo. We all worked together to solve the puzzles and kept everyone engaged, and helped avoid the “backseat player” dynamic common in some cooperative games. That’s a mechanic we want to consciously build into our submarine game: shared puzzles with multi-part clues or physical/digital tasks that require coordination rather than turn-taking.
While I enjoy the game, the game also has different assumptions about its players. Many puzzles rely on culturally specific knowledge: Roman numerals, mirror writing, Western calendar formats, and English wordplay. For players without this background, the challenge becomes not just about solving but translating. I was thinking that when a puzzle is only solvable by those with niche knowledge, it stops being about logic and becomes a gatekeeper. For our game design, we should think about how to broaden access. Can puzzles be visual-first? Can clues be given in multiple formats (audio, tactile, text)? And how can we design puzzles that reward reasoning over recall?
EXIT gave me very good insights for designing our game, making puzzles that feel embedded in the environment, using storytelling, building collaborative mechanics that require shared problem-solving, and designing inclusively. A good puzzle doesn’t have to be elaborate and it just has to make the player feel like they discovered something meaningful.
