Try 2 Escape: A Pirate’s Life | Review

You are a brave pirate who has been trying to find Blackbeard’s treasure for many years. You know if you find his treasure this would make you the Pirate of all Pirates. You’ll need to use all your cunning and bravery to solve the clues to find where the treasure lies and sail the seven seas.

Rating: Yo ho yes!
Completion Time: 35 minutes
Date Played: 15th October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Small Group, Adults or Families

A Pirate’s Life is a short and sweet play at home escape game from the crafty people behind Leisure Kings, who have turned their hand from team events to something a little more digital: online escape games from the comfort of your own home! Introducing Try 2 Escape.

The idea and object of this game is simple. You are a pirate, locked up (perhaps rightfully by the amount of grog I’d apparently drunk!) and alone, who must first break out of jail, find a ship (with the help of hilariously named Two Toes Terry!), and set sail into the sunset in search of the legendary Blackbeard’s treasure!

I actually remember reading about this in an article a long time ago. I think I must have been googling Octopuses (just your normal Google searches huh?) – they think some of Blackbeard’s Treasure might have been found. Little do the archaeologists know that actually, I just discovered his treasure myself! Right now, when I played this game. That’s right – we won!

The game is overall fun and light hearted. Player 2 and I finished this one at the end of a cosy Thursday night over a couple of drinks around my laptop. I’ve never actually played a game of this format via Zoom, but the website does recommend it would be good for that too! For me – where a game is linear with one puzzle each after another protected by a password at each stage – I think an in-person group is just the ticket for the best player experience.

If you do want to boost the experience of playing A Pirate’s Life up a few notches, the game comes with a ‘setting up guide’ which includes some of the coolest looking cocktail suggestions I’ve ever heard! Alcoholic or… Grog free! You’ve also got a kit of printable costumes (eyepatches and wrap around pirate hats!), and a cheat-sheet of pirate slang. You bet I studied up and I’ll be shivering my timbers the rest of the weekend!

Our cocktails… Well they had grog in them! I went a little off menu on this one as my ingredient collection was limited – but if you want to try what we tried, combine sweet pea tea (for the blue colour) with whiskey, a dash of bitters, lemon and syrup. The little octopus I cut out of an apple is optional!

In terms of puzzles, the game starts easy peasy and ramps up to a good level of difficulty by the end! In particular Try 2 Escape has really good website interactivity – each puzzle has click and drag elements, things to assemble, jigsaws to put back together and a slider puzzle which probably took me 60% of the total time take to finish! Haha.

I mention it as I think this is the first online escape game I’ve played that makes good use of this interactivity. There’s no printing, no static pages you have to copy into MS Paint to manipulate! A nice touch!

A Pirate’s Life can be purchased for £20 on Try 2 Escape’s website.