Escape Rooms are quite a recent phenomena, but it’s hard to deny that they’ve become pretty huge in recent years. There are obviously plenty of real life escape rooms, but also loads of virtual ones too. Another Door: Escape Room attempts to bring the idea into VR, but really make it feel like you’re experiencing a real one. There’s the standard corny story setup, but there’s also the layered puzzling that sees you diving into multiple rooms before you can truly escape.
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NO ESCAPE
Another Door: Escape Room doesn’t have one narrative thread through the game, instead opting for 5 different ones for each escape room. There’s cursed dolls, psychotic experiments, and neat Egyptian themes amongst the stories, and whilst none of them are deeper than providing a reason for you to be there, it does at least allow for a handful of distinctly unique themes for you to puzzle through.
It’s quite amazing how well the game manages to fuse together a series of escape rooms that make you feel like you’re experiencing one in real life, whilst also adding in elements that wouldn’t necessarily be possible. A large part of how real it feels is the minimalist design that allows you to start with a manageable number of elements, before expanding out. One such level has you in one half of a room, with little more to do beyond rummaging through the shelves until you find the components needed to trigger the first main puzzle; after that, you’ll start getting more components that can be used now or later. Earlier rooms aren’t complete however after things open up, so you’ll often need to go between previous rooms in order to solve all the puzzles needed to open the exit door.
It works really well, and the rooms have a nice increase in difficulty from one to the next. Sure, you can jump to the later stages should you so wish – but you may have a far easier time starting with the earlier ones instead. Of course, two heads are better than one so you may even want to dive in with a friend to help increase your offs of solving the room before time runs out. I like that they added in a multiplayer option, as escape rooms tend to be a more social experience – however rooms are definitely solvable alone should you so wish. If you’re worried about knowing all the answers afterwards, the game does remix the solutions a little bit to help encourage replayability – although admittedly since you’ll know the method to get to that point, it does still lessen the difficulty a tad when playing through a second time. Regardless, I appreciate that they added in random solutions as otherwise there would be no reason to go through again after finishing all five rooms.
Another Door really does have some fantastic escape rooms, but there’s just one problem that sets it back: the game only supports teleportation movement. Whilst you are encouraged to walk around as much as possible, as well as physically crouch to grab objects, that will only get you so far unless you’re blessed with a gigantic play space. As such, you’ll end up having to use the teleportation movement a lot to get around and that can be a real buzz-skill for VR enthusiasts. I definitely approve of its inclusion to help cater towards people prone to VR sickness, but zipping around makes the game feel so archaic. I really hope the developers decide to add it in a future update, as it will do wonders for making these rooms feel far more immersive.
VERDICT
Even though Another Door: Escape Room fails to include analogue movement, it’s hard to deny that the game features a wide range of well designed escape rooms. With multiplayer support to help add a social element (which will prove handy for those trickier rooms), this will probably end up being the best escape room game in VR…. so long as they patch in smooth movement controls later on!
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