Edaqa’s Room: Prototype | Review

You’ve applied for a new job, an amazing role as a game master at a brand new escape room. Alas, a mishap has you trapped in the very room you’re supposed to run. Can you get out before the vampires* come? *There are no vampires, but you might get hungry if you take too long.

Completion Time: 50 Minutes
Date Played: July 2021
Party Size: 4
Difficulty: Medium

Following the success of Edaqa’s Room’s game Carnival, we (Escaping the Closet) were keen to try out this company’s rooms ourselves! Edaqa’s Room were kind enough to send us the links to both Prototype & Carnival and where better to start off than with Prototype. It was time to get the dream team together (Ash, Al, Mairi & Tasha), and we are so glad that we took the time to try this room out. It did not disappoint!

First day of a new job…

The storyline is very unique (and a bit meta) as you are trapped in the Escape Room that you are interviewing to run as a GM! Wendy has hired you and left you in charge, when you unfortunately get locked in. As a GM in training, this isn’t exactly the best start to your newly chosen career path… Surely the golden rule of GM’ing is ‘don’t lose track of the keys?!’

The game begins with some simple, yet humorous dialogue, before throwing players into the cartoon world of Edaqa’s Prototype. It looks like a fairly standard living room – if your living room curtains and rug are extremely sassy that is! This was one of the things we loved the most about Prototype. The humour! The text captions are very well written, full of wit, there was a brilliant amount of sarcasm, and we couldn’t stop laughing!

Logical and memorable!

The storyline then develops naturally as players progress, with spaces opening up in unexpected ways. We faced a particularly challenging puzzle early on in the game which thankfully Tasha managed to figure out. Prototype is one of those rooms that throws out all sorts of puzzles, making the room ideal for newbies or enthusiasts alike, as there is something for everyone.

It features stand-alone puzzles which are solved using one element of the room, along with more drawn out puzzles, which help to make the game feel logical, and give players plenty of satisfactory moments when successfully solving something!

One of the most memorable puzzles used a children’s book (think Old McDonald), and some clever word play, combined with an audio puzzle. This was really well put together, and although it took us quite a bit of time to solve, the feeling of success when we cracked it was great. Turns out we were just missing some fairly obvious hints!

Playing together, digitally

The interface is very clever too. Despite the cartoon graphics, nothing feels simple and you soon realise that there are some difficult puzzles lurking beneath the ‘normal’ appearance of the room. We always like an interface which works in real-time, with one player solving a puzzle, triggering the solution for all players – and Prototype does this very well.

This essentially means the game has been set up to gel well with digital play. For example, there are a number of elements which are used to try and bring the game into the ‘now’, which we find always helps to increase the immersion, and gives that bit of extra excitement that can be sometimes lacking in a virtual game. 

One thing we haven’t seen before that we really liked was the fact that the room told you which player had solved which puzzle: it was fun seeing a flash up on the screen with a player’s name and the puzzle name that they had solved. Again, the humour in this game is on point and seeing a hilarious puzzle name pop up on everyone’s screen was the icing on the cake!

Overall

We would highly recommend this game – it was funny, the graphics were really cute, and the puzzles were challenging! There were even elements of searching required in this game, which is unusual in a point and click game. Much to our advantage, we seem to be much better at searching in a digital game than IRL (hopefully this might help us to hone our skills in preparation for our future physical escape room endeavours…but we’re not holding out hope!).

This is a really good option for a fun digital escape session with friends and definitely worth the bargain cost of £12 to play!

Would you turn down this incredible job opportunity and make Wendy sad? We don’t think so…You can book to play Edaqa’s games here. 

Ratings