Cube Escape: Paradox, by developer Rusty Lake, is an escape room game available on Steam and Itch.io for Mac and Windows as well as the Google Play Store and Apple App Store for Android and iOS devices, respectively. Intended for somewhat mature audiences, the game features violence and horror elements as the player tries to piece together the story’s narrative and escape the single square room they are confined in. The point-and-click mechanics of the game directly infuse a murder mystery narrative into the simpler starting mystery of how the player character, a detective, arrived here and how he may escape, as the player is forced to interact with explicit narrative elements including expository text and character images. And while we may not always think of a single, simple room as being architecture, the room and its contents are designed such that all of the primary functions of architecture in games are indeed present and competently utilized (as well as several secondary functions).
The initial mystery of Cube Escape: Paradox is perhaps implied by its name, as the player character finds themselves locked in a single cubical room, allowing them to rotate to see the room’s four walls and various interactable contents. When jiggling the doorknob fails, it is clear that we must solve the mystery common to all escape rooms of how to exit. Attempting to click on anything in the room reveals a basic point-and-click mechanic, along with a simple inventory of objects that can be picked up. Moving around the room and clicking on things quickly introduces the player to an array of mysterious objects, including locked drawers, cryptic notes, and explicit puzzle boxes. This makes it clear to the player that they will need to solve a series of puzzles in order to escape, even if they are unfamiliar with the escape room genre. Without any brute force options to bust down the door, they are forced into engaging with the universal mystery of the escape room if they wish to continue playing.
Fig 1: A mysterious woman outside the keyhole (and a very early injection of narrative into the game, assuming the player first investigates the escape room’s door)
Fig 2: Confirmation of the player character’s identity (and a requirement to solve a puzzle, note the smoke symbol exhaled by the character)
The slightly subtler mystery of how and why the player character ended up here, also common but not universal to the genre, with many simple escape games being devoid of a wider narrative, is communicated by the interactable objects in the room and ways that information is provided to the player when they complete certain steps. Clicking on the door’s keyhole sometimes shows nothing, but around a third of the time shows either a partially transparent woman or a spooky black silhouette with white eyes. This immediately accessible bit of narrative flavoring shows that this is more than a bare-bones escape room: there is some sort of presence with us. But what is it? A message left on a typewriter says “I woke up in this room. I felt different. Where is she?”, further implying that we mysteriously appeared in this room and are looking for someone female, perhaps the woman outside the keyhole? Assembling photo fragments reveals an image of the same woman beside an unknown man (and the back of the photo reveals the answer that must be typed into the typewriter: “the woman”. If the player clicks on the room’s mirror, they show that the player character is indeed the very same man, confirming that they are not an outside observer but a part of the unfolding narrative. Further interacting with the typewriter page with a pencil reveals a drawing of the woman with the text “What do I know about her? How did she die?” with the only possible interaction being to draw a line across her neck, causing blood to seep out, indicating that this mystery woman was murdered by a slit throat or decapitation. The next drawing, a key (that can be picked up if its outlines are followed), is accompanied by the text “Case 23 might be the key to escape my mind”, establishing that the player is a police detective and that his surroundings are some kind of mental prison tied to a murder case he investigated.
Thus, the point-and-click mechanic of clicking on different objects to interact with them, reveals the deeper narrative of a man being imprisoned in his mind, haunted by an unsolved murder case. Even if the player was uninterested in this story and wanted to speed to the exit, images (e.g. photos and the detective’s drawing of the mysterious woman), text (e.g. on typewriter pages and a pamphlet) and even subtitled dialog (e.g. during a later phone call and a cassette recording) embed information and items needed to progress within explicit narrative material. This means there is no option to avoid engagement with the escape room’s deeper narrative in order to make progress. This means that the narrative is presented rather bluntly rather than being subtly woven into the gameplay, but it is certainly effective at presenting the narrative to the player. It cannot be missed.
Fig 3: Familiar objects: tape recorder and clock
Fig 4: Unfamiliar object: spooky, surreal painting
The game’s architecture controls the story effectively, utilizing both the primary and secondary functions of architecture as understood by game designers. The single square room with its locked door provides an obvious means of constraint that establishes the narrative of entrapment and escape: the player cannot go anywhere else without engaging with the room’s contents and a win condition (unlocking the door) is very clearly implied. The contents of the room, featuring locked drawers and puzzle boxes, both conceals information and items the player needs to progress while simultaneously providing obstacles that must be overcome, forcing the development of the narrative through these interactions. While these contents are not architecture per se in the sense of being structural parts of a building, they certainly make up the figurative architecture of an escape room. And the four walls of the room, which can be rotated between with an arrow to either side of the screen, provide a very clear understanding of the space, facilitating easy exploration. As for secondary functions, the contents of the room create a clash between familiarity with normal items like a clock and phone, and unfamiliarity, like the central painting of a seated silhouette and crow man and the ghostly figures through the keyhole. Interacting with familiar items grounds the story with simple expectations, and the unfamiliar items show that deeper is amiss, pointing to the deeper narrative. In combination, the room’s contents create a deep feeling of surrealism that reinforces the narrative of the character being trapped not in a real, physical space but within his own mind. All of these elements serve to demonstrate cliches, setting up thematic expectations of an escape room game and of a mystery with horror elements.
While it is not always subtle with how it weaves its narrative into the overall mystery, Cube Escape: Paradox competently reveals its deeper story through forced gameplay interactions, and its simple architecture controls this story very well with a variety of informational and thematic cues.
Ethics
The primary accessibility feature, and only accessibility feature that I can find, is the game’s dialog being subtitled. At various points of the game, narrative exposition and critical clues for solving puzzles are presented audibly, such as through a phone call, cassette recording, and television transmissions. If someone were deaf or otherwise hard of hearing and this information was exclusively available as sound, then they would be blocked from forward progress very quickly. Subtitling is a simple way to overcome this barrier with almost no extra effort on the part of the developer (after all, the information must already exist as text in order to have voice actors make recordings from a script).
Fig 5: Dialog subtitles.
In my search to find an account from a deaf person discussing this, I only found a comment on the developer’s Facebook page, saying “me and my cousin love to play the rusty lake games, he’s 10 and a deaf kid but he still loves the game as much as me” (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1292769207574792&id=381141388737583&set=a.397285717123150). So there’s at least one attestation implying this subtitle feature works, even if it is indirect. It likely helps that the subtitle text is very large and has decent visual contrast with the rest of the game’s visuals, making it hard to miss when playing in fullscreen, even if the player has some visual impairment (although many other subtler visual details would likely be challenging to make out).
