CU Adventures: Floor 13 | Review

You’re trapped in your office building after-hours, and you stumble into a place that shouldn’t exist. Discover the secrets of Floor 13 and escape the building…if you can! Discover clues, piece together login codes, and go face to face with a haunted computer. Solve the challenges of this slightly spooky escape room from the comfort of home!

Rating: Mysterious
Completion Time: ~1hr
Date Played: 21st January 2021
Party Size: 3
Recommended For: People who want an escape room fix in lockdown!

Ages ago- and I mean AGES AGO I won a competition from the fabulous Escape Room Escapades folks to play Floor 13 by CU Adventures. I then promptly forgot all about it until the new year. But you know what they say about new years? New year, new me, new escape rooms? Sure. They say that!

CU Adventures comes super highly recommended, so I suggested it to a new group of friends to try out at once. The concept is refreshing, and it’s about as close as it’s possible to be to a real life escape room in a browser based game and for that I’m impressed! Each player logs in remotely, there’s a “Leader” and a number of “Companions”. Each can play at their own pace, exploring new areas, finding new things, and solving puzzles alone (or in many cases, collaboratively).

Which by the way, works really nicely with the setting. If the title of the game weren’t a giveaway, this escape game takes place on “Floor 13”, a mysterious office floor with plenty of secret rooms and nooks and crannies to discover.

If I had to highlight one aspect of the gameplay which was a little tricky, it’s the leader-companion dynamic. Put simply, only the leader can interact with things. So even if a companion finds something, the leader must stop what they’re doing and go to where the companion is in order to complete the challenge. Fine if it’s a major puzzle that lets us advance, and mildly annoying if it’s just picking up a key.

That said, any ‘mildly annoying’ quirk was quickly put to one side by how fun the game is to play. There’s a printed element to keep your hands busy, and the story is one part mysterious and one part “oh that’s pretty cool!” I’m a fan of the 90s – the decor, the pop culture references, the strange mortal fear of Y2K. So this one ticked a lot of boxes. I mean, I’m still not exactly sure how I ended up on Floor 13. It’s kinda like this time in my real life office where our smart lift suddenly malfunctioned and showed floors all the way up to 16 (it was a 6 floor building). But unlike that time in real life, Floor 13 actually lets you press those buttons and you emerge into a nostalgic, dystopian time of technological simplicity.

Finally – you didn’t think I’d finish a review without mentioning this, did you? – the puzzles! Well, the puzzles in Floor 13 were brilliant. Now, full disclosure: before this game I’d been having major puzzle fatigue. My last couple of games I couldn’t seem to figure anything out. *dramatic sigh* I thought my puzzling days were over. But something about Floor 13 made everything click again. Perhaps it was my fantastic team (seriously, these two ladies are escape room queens and I’m honoured to have buddied up with them for this game), or perhaps it was the well rounded strength of the puzzles in the game? Why not both?

There’s a good mix of slightly videogame-esque puzzles, puzzles that make you cut and assemble dials to line up, puzzles that have you turning things upside down, puzzles that think outside the box… In fact, I felt all the puzzles to be fabulously unique to Floor 13. I really praise a game where I’ve not seen a puzzle before, and CU Adventures ticks every box here.

In fact, we’ve decided to award it the Wow Award for innovation!

Overall, we completed the game respectably under an hour. I didn’t time exactly how long we took – but I’m pleased with the result nonetheless!

Floor 13 can be played for $10 USD on CU Adventure’s website.

Ratings