This week, I played Cube Escape: Paradox, which is an escape room-like game created by Rusty Lake. I played the first chapter for free on Steam. This game is suitable for anyone who enjoys escape rooms and mystery/puzzle games. In the game, I controlled a detective named Dale, who does not seem to have perfect memory of his circumstances and tries to escape a room. I uncovered details of the murder of a woman named Laura through the point of view of Dale. Cube Escape: Paradox tells a narrative through its mechanics by using the player’s process of solving the puzzles to escape the room reflect Dale’s story in piecing together his own memory and pieces of information to the murder case, which allows for the puzzles of the game to be part of the player’s observation and discovery that creates the narrative.
The mechanics of the game include rotating between four walls total of a room and interacting with various objects that can be collected and tampered with. These objects all follow the theme of the story, and I found myself trying to theorize or reason through what the ominous messages could all come together to be, for example, after reconstructing a photo of Laura to reveal the words “the woman”, this was meant to be used as a hint of how to interact with a typewriter with a seemingly related hint, then leading me to the next puzzle of the game. These mechanics created the dynamics of investigation and exploration.
The game encourages the player to closely examine everything in the room, ranging from photos, cabinets, mirrors, and little trinkets placed everywhere. Any object in this carefully curated room could contain information relating to the murder case, or hints and helper objects to progress in the investigation. Many of these puzzles became nuanced, such as one where the player must collect a handle to a projector and insert a photo into a projector, then find where the image is projected and read roman numerals circled on the projected image. I felt like I was actively part of an investigative process while playing this game because of the environment created by the room and how the gameplay required me to move through a simple 4 wall room and pay attention to my surroundings as they unfolded.
This game notably also leaves the player with an incomplete starting point as they enter the narrative, which directly reflects Dale’s own state of also not being entirely sure what is happening. The player experiences this effect first hand as well, and the solving of the puzzles is what allows a narrative to be slowly constructed. As someone who has also played many physical escape rooms, I liked that there was more of a structured narrative to this game than a traditional escape room, where there usually is a theme and a broad premise, but much less effort into actually developing a story and making each component relevant to the narrative. Despite not having the tactile component of physical escape rooms, I found this game to be more mentally engaging thus equally enjoyable of an experience to my favorite escape rooms. The digital medium really allowed for more exploration and development of a psychological narrative through the investigative and interactive gameplay itself.
I did not find any obvious accessibility concerns as I played the game, however, I can recognize that this style of game may be more difficult for some to play. Since the game requires very sharp visual observation skills and the ability to somewhat retain information and notice small visual details and changes, some may find this game more difficult to play. I found some of the colors of the game to be dull thus I personally did find it difficult to see things sometimes. I did notice occasionally that hints were given more obviously, for example at some point if the player looked in the mirror, a reflection of Dale and a thought box displaying text with something along the lines of “I should probably check the lights” serves as a very accessible hint. The easy visualization of an inventory and sometimes more obvious hints were helpful in moving the game along in a way that I would believe is accessible to most players. I found this to be helpful personally as I did find myself stuck until recognizing apparent hints sometimes. The game overall tries to balance accessibility to different skill levels with the actual difficulty of the game that would make it actually fun.
Overall, I found Cube Escape: Paradox to be a very enjoyable game to play. I was immersed in the perspective of a detective, Dale, and played with mechanics that allowed me to fully enter the character. At times, I felt that the narrative was too ambiguous or abstract, and there wasn’t a clear narrative by the end of Chapter 1, however, the plot was certainly very exciting to engage with as it unfolded. With the design of the game, I found the narrative to be an engaging and interactive experience, where puzzles directly shaped the narrative.
