EscapeWelt: IQube Duel | Review

IQube Duel: These unique puzzle boxes, designed as an escape room in a box, come in two vibrant styles. They’re perfect for some friendly competition with friends and family. Race against each other to see who can crack the puzzles first and unlock the secrets inside!

Date Played: October 2024
Time Taken: ~55 minutes
Number of Players: 2
Difficulty: Moderate

Please note, we received a complimentary early copy to co-incide with the Kickstarter. This does not change the content of our review, but our version and photographs may differ slightly from the final version fulfilled by the EscapeWelt team.

EscapeWelt are one of those companies you see consistently hit their funding goals on Kickstarter. They have this tried and tested formula of consistently making high quality games, executing a good marketing strategy for each, and of course, having a large dedicated audience that return time after time. So when they mentioned to me that they had an upcoming Kickstarter, of course I was excited! Now that the Kickstarter is live, true to their track record it’s fully funded and well on track to fulfill by Christmas 2024. Excellent!

About IQube Duel

Wasting no time at all, my regular player 2 and I sat down to tackle the two IQube Duel boxes almost as soon as they arrived. In typical EscapeWelt fashion, both boxes sit comfortably in your hands  (under 4 inches along each face) and are made up of lots of small sliding components, levers, and things to play with. It’s a smörgåsbord of puzzly things. Push this, pull that, rotate that dial… And so on.

Now the real unique selling point of the IQube Duel compared to the rest of EscapeWelt’s catalogue is that it’s a game for two players. You receive with your order two almost-identical puzzle boxes… I say almost identical, because the visual design does differ, but as far as I could tell with my player 2 we were solving the same puzzles in the same order. On mine, the Da Vinci-esque layout of scraps of parchment and illustrations, and in my partner’s a steampunk mechanical view of gears, pipes and steam.

With the added air of competitiveness, it took us both a little while to get started and figure out exactly what to begin with. I find this is the case with most puzzle boxes, as there is always too much to look at and too much to play with right off the bat. There wasn’t too much signposting, you instead have to root around and poke around a bit to see what moves. Anchoring the whole experience however was a little metal ball, and so if you’re looking for a hint as to where to get started – seeing where you can roll the metal ball to and where it gets stuck is an excellent place to begin.

GIF by EscapeWelt

If there are hints, we didn’t find them. But we found as a whole the experience was entry-level enough to not need them. I would expect that post-Kickstarter they’ll have a helpful guide online, which will be doubly useful if you want to reset it. But, playing an early access copy we were left to our own devices and so probably took a little longer than the average players, coming in at around 1 hour gameplay time each, playing side by side.

For me, my favourite puzzle in the experience was the slider puzzle, which is available to be played around with pretty early in the game. My player 2 on the other hand enjoyed moving the small metal ball around the maze, and how each of the other adjacent sides interacted with that. To say too much more might give away the puzzles themselves, but you can hopefully see from the photographs that there’s a broad range of puzzle interactions contained within the small space, giving you plenty to do.

In terms of durability, it’s a big question that comes up a lot when reviewing mechanical puzzle boxes. In this game, one of the two boxes had a little break – a small component snapped off during the gameplay, but this didn’t render the puzzle unsolvable. I think it may actually have more to do with our heavy hands. Sometimes you’re not entirely sure whether something is supposed to move and it’s just a little stuck, or if we’re jumping way ahead of a puzzle and haven’t unlocked the blocker. In our case, we were able to fix our break with a dab of superglue.

Last but not least, in terms of aesthetics, these boxes do look great. On top of the puzzles, you have these illustrated sheets that set the ‘vibe’ of the game. I did have a little hesitation that on first impression I was sure the designs were AI-generated. There are a few things a little bit “off” about some of the gears and cogs and background designs. Here at The Escape Roomer we are strongly anti-AI art, and don’t typically review content that features it heavily. However the EscapeWelt team have assured me that AI art is not used in the final design. I’m not totally convinced, but I have to give them the benefit of the doubt in their design.

IQube Duel, the Verdict

In all, I enjoyed it! It’s been a really long time since I’ve played a wooden mechnical puzzle box, and picking up this one reminded me what I enjoyed about it. Games like this sit in their own separate genre. It’s impossible to judge a game like this on our usual metrics, like “story” or “immersion”, in the same way you couldn’t rate a rubix cube. Games like these are best enjoyed by feeling your way through the puzzles until something “clicks” – and in the case of this, it might literally click. It wasn’t outstanding, but it was reliably good – as all EscapeWelt games are.

At the time of writing, the game is only available on Kickstarter and you can either pledge for just one box, two boxes, or pledge to get any number of bonus box add-ons. If you’re playing solo, you’d be fine to just order the one box and play through yourself, which costs about £33. If you plan to play with someone else, the two-box version is an option – and perhaps more economical at £58 if you wanted to stash a gift inside the spare one and give it away as a gift whilst retaining a copy of the game for yourself. Objectively, this does make it fairly expensive in terms of gameplay, but also doubles as a beautiful keepsake.

In terms of difficulty, this is a fairly moderate, but entry-level puzzle box. There was nothing too challenging or unexpected in it, and most people will be able to complete the whole thing in 30-60 minutes, depending on their level of experience with games like this. I’d recommend this for all adult players – purely because younger players may be a little rough with the mechanisms and smaller parts, but you know yourself and your players best.

As a final note, that the game’s launch co-incides with Christmas makes this a good gift both in itself and as a mechanism for storing other (albeit small) gifts inside for your recipient to unlock. If nothing else, it’s one of the coolest lock boxes you can find on the market at the moment. I’ll personally keep my two copies for myself since they look absolutely gorgeous in pride of place on my board game shelf!

If you’re interested in getting yourself a copy, it’s currently available on Kickstarter and, if the Kickstarter has concluded, you can check out their website here.