There are so many games out there that are great for escape room and mystery room fans. Here are some of our favourite games that champion puzzles, stories, teamwork and escapism!
The Room: What you would get if you set out to build an escape room with an unlimited budget and the brain of a mad scientist
A mysterious invitation leads to the attic of an abandoned house. In the room is a cast-iron safe laced with strange carvings and on top, a note from your distant companion. It promises something ancient and astonishing concealed in the iron chamber – you need only find a way in.
The Room series (4 games all up) is great fun! Full of puzzles, mystery and intrigue. The story you end up piecing together is poignant and engaging, and the puzzles are really A+.
Drew
A Normal Lost Phone: A game that teaches you to look for details and piece together the story
A Normal Lost Phone is a game about exploring the intimacy of an unknown person whose phone was found by the player. The game takes the shape of a narrative investigation: you have to search the phone’s text messages, pictures, and applications, in order to learn about its former owner. Through this phone, you uncover Sam’s life, friends, family, and relationships, until the evening when they turn 18 and mysteriously disappear.
Plenty of puzzles and a deeply satisfying emotional story… all disguised behind a simple fake phone interface. Lots of scribbled notes are required. If you enjoyed “Orwell” or any other short mystery puzzle games I can’t recommend them enough!
Adam
We Were Here: The ultimate 2-player escape room experience
The We Were Here series is a set of online first-person cooperative puzzle adventure games set in and around the fictional medieval Castle Rock in the wastes of Antarctica. They are all about cooperative discovery, immersion, and teamwork through communication. You and a partner must solve puzzles through smart communication and observation. Teamwork is not optional!
We Were Here and it’s sequels are the perfect 2-player experience for fans of puzzles, mystery, and intrigue. Piece the story together while exploring hauntingly beautiful environments. It’s not even possible to play this solo, or to quarterback the whole experience, as you are split up for almost the whole game and can only communicate what you are seeing and doing by radio. It’s perfect.
David
The Witness: It’s like an escape room spread across an entire island!
The Witness is a single-player game in an open world with dozens of locations to explore and over 500 puzzles. This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. There’s no filler; each of those puzzles brings its own new idea into the mix.
Technically a single-player game, but the puzzles are complex enough to make it a great two-player experience.
We had someone in The Collector say that the room made them think of The Witness, which we were very proud of.
David
Pedestrian
This is a really cool little game. It’s not super long but has some really cool puzzles and a great concept. You play a little dude that lives on 2D surfaces like street signs. You jump around and travel across signs, making connections and collecting pieces of hardware to proceed through the game. Because we’re nerds, we even figured out a way to make this single-player game co-op by talking through solutions and having one of us control the dude and the other make the connections.
EXiTS – Room Escape Game
I’ve been in love with EXiTS on mobile. There are heaps of levels and the puzzles actually get really tricky. Since I last played they’ve introduced levels that you can only play on certain days and hard-mode levels. The visuals are quirky and quaint but the puzzles are seriously tricky. Tis a good timesink on the couch.
