Scarlet Envelope: Time Trap Island | Review

Time Trap Island Review | Welcome to Time Trap Island, where reality is twisted and the very fabric of the universe is messed up. Formerly the base of a secretive Red Letter Corp., the Island is now a playground of dangerous anomalies. What kind of Interdimensional Science Project went wrong here? And what do you have to do to ESCAPE?

Date Played: June 2024
Time Taken: ~2 hours (over two sessions)
Number of Players: 1.5
Difficulty: Very Hard

With hindsight I’d have liked to go back and plot the difficulty level of each Scarlet Envelope game on a bar chart just to see whether my suspicion that they’re getting harder each time is correct. You could argue that each letter is training for the next one as they ramp up steadily over the series. That or I’m losing my ability to solve puzzles as well as I once could. Honestly, it could be either. But this game… This game was tough! 🫠

With Time Trap comes the penultimate experience in Scarlet Envelope’s history. What started as a Kickstarter campaign back in June 2020 has finally almost concluded. We’re 11 envelopes later, 1 more to go. I sadly didn’t back the campaign at the time, but it’s been an honour to be along the journey with the creators seeing their puzzles develop and the story continue. What I find most interesting from a personal point of view is how much I’ve changed from playing my first game to this most recent. People I played the first few chapters with I haven’t spoken to or seen in years, and some of the people I play the latest chapters with I hadn’t even met yet back then. I’ve moved house twice, one of those to a brand new city. I’ve also met the creators of Scarlet Envelope in person, in the most wonderful trip to Montreal ever. I remember the specific jobs I held when I played each one, and if I care to count it, I’d say I’ve had a new “main client” job at least every 2-3 Scarlet Envelopes. In this way perhaps I can measure the last four years of my life in Scarlet Envelope chapters played… And that, to me, is kinda cool. There aren’t many serialised games I can do that with.

But this isn’t a review of me and my life, so let’s get back to it.

Fans of the whole series will recognise a lot of easter eggs in this penultimate chapter. There are subtle and not-so-subtle hints towards other games like Screaming Venice Art Heist, the Golden Dragon, Breakfast for a Serial Killer, and so on. In this way this is probably a game I wouldn’t recommend playing without the context of the previous, though I do believe it’s possible to purchase one-off envelopes now.

A Mysterious Red Envelope Arrives

In my experience of Time Trap Island, after receiving a mysterious red envelope (always the best kind of puzzle post) a day before my birthday, I saved the first part of the game for then. Maybe it was a cake-fugue, but come the day of my birthday I managed about 45 minutes of puzzling time, working my way through the first couple of puzzles before deciding to take a break. A break to eat more cake and go for a long walk.

I then came back to the game a few days later, this time with a player 2 who had popped round for a puzzle game night. She’d played a few Scarlet Envelope games with me before so understood the context. I caught her up on this envelope, and we decided to tackle the last few together. A smart choice! And this time we were less hesitant to use clues, and dipped in liberally. There were one or two moments that, even after looking through all the clues associated with the puzzle I didn’t quite understand a particular leap or why the answer was formatted in that way. The notes in the clues section saying “Brace yourself for the most challenging” should have been a warning, but invariably I only checked these after I got stuck. That said, overall having a second brain definitely helped make a few more of those logic jumps or see a particular puzzle in a different way, or if you’re me – point out that I’m holding one of the puzzles the wrong way around and that’s why it wasn’t working.

But besides the difficultness, there were a few absolutely delightful puzzles in here that were quite unlike anything I tackled before. I absolutely adore puzzles that use physical ephemera in interesting ways, and Time Trap Island has this in bucket loads. There’s some interesting transparent sheets, there’s a few small bits of paper with cuts in it, and there’s a vintage computer print-out. It’s lighter than some envelopes, but just a quick glance and you can tell there’s a lot in this game.

Since some Scarlet Envelope games are non-linear, and others are linear, some are totally analogue, and some are (almost) totally digital, and some of the starts are well signposted, others are not… Even if I think I know what to expect, I’m always a little hesitant getting started on a game.

In this one, I spotted a puzzle I thought I could solve. I have an eagle-eye for certain types of ciphers, and as soon as I spotted a character waving his arms around I knew which particular cipher I was looking for. I jotted down what I found, then went off to explore the other objects trying to solve them as I went. It was only then that I realised that this game is linear and much more digital than analogue. I flipped over a piece of paper I’d already been trying to solve, and realised it had a note on the back telling me to start with the online web portal.

About the Online Web Portal

Once I’d found the right path into the web-portal, I was off. Compared to other Scarlet Envelope games, this one errs on the side of being more digital than more analogue. A few puzzles are solved almost entirely online, but occasionally you dip back into the printed paper to look for a clue or do a particular interaction.

Some of my favourite things about Time Trap Island were the web interactions. The Scarlet Envelope team design the most fantastic web-portals that seamlessly act like the thing they’re supposed to. In this game, it was a CRT7-looking green text computer that served as the intranet of the mysterious Time Trap Island’s staff homepage. There were conversations between staff, a map, chat boxes, clues, and cool images to discover. Playing around with it was like a treasure trove of cool content, and a delight to play with. Interspersed with puzzle content were videos and audio files. Being temporally specific, these made me feel like I was watching something straight out of the retropunk that is Fall Out’s before times. I loved it.

Time Trap Island: The Verdict

Overall, I found Time Trap Island to be quite difficult, but this didn’t damper my enjoyment of it in the slightest. I always look forward to new Scarlet Envelope games, and I love seeing how they work new genres and styles into their ongoing serial game. In Time Trap Island, we tackle… Well… Time travel, and it’s done so thoughtfully and carefully with excellent digital and physical graphics.

Time Trap Island can be played by purchasing a physical copy on Scarlet Envelope’s website here.

Please Note: I was not charged to play this game, but this has not affected my review.