Escape Rooms have been a popular form of entertainment lately.  From what I understand, you and a group are ‘trapped’ in a room and must figure out puzzles in the room in a limited time to get out.  Some of my friends and family said I would like these, but I dunno.  Depends on how much they cost, I guess.  But what if Escape Rooms came out during the 8-bit NES days?  You know they’d make a game about it on the Nintendo!  And now they have with NEScape!  It’s a new, unlicensed game running on NES hardware.  Originally you could only buy it as a cartridge, but now you can also play it on the Switch and PCs as well (reviewed on Switch here).

The game controls like a typical point and click adventure.  You move an eyeball shaped icon around the screen, and it changes to a finger or magnifying glass if you roll it over things.  There are four walls in the room to scroll through, each with things like desk drawers and puzzles to interact with.  You can also pick up items as well, and they’ll appear in a box on the bottom of the screen.  You can click on these items to use them, or even combine items as well.  You have a full hour to solve all the puzzles in the room and escape!

The main problem I had with the game is how obtuse some of the puzzles are.  Kind of reminds me of Myst.  Like, how are you supposed to know to use a hair dryer to melt a statue?  Statues usually don’t melt, and you can’t tell it’s meltable in the game.  Also, the limitations of NES hardware also make solving puzzles overly difficult.  The limited graphics make some things hard to see, and the fuzzy voice clips you need to hear are also hard to understand.  I swear when they said, “Shiver” it sounded to me like “Sewer.”  Luckily I had a guide with the press kit I got for this game, I don’t know how anyone could finish this one without it.  Also would’ve been nice to have more than just one room to solve, or a way you could do a quicksave if you don’t have a full hour to commit to this one.  But even so, I still think it’s neat they made a NES game out of this topic, and if you like Escape Rooms, you may want to check this one out as well.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  But because of the high level of puzzle solving involved, I’d say this one’s best for older gamers.  NEScape! is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews