(NOTE: this review was started way back in February, due to the way the games in this collection weave in and out of external games it has taken me this long to finally finish playing! As such, my prologue refers to events that all occured at years start).
To describe The Rotting Zombie HQ as 'battle damaged' this week would be quite accurate. Thanks to a blocked sink and accidentally leaving the tap on, the bathroom flooded through the ceiling into the front room so have spent days trying to dry downstairs, a pungent smell of wet dog fills the whole house now. My house roof also appears to be leaking as water is dripping out of my extraction fan. Then, the icing on the cake was someone reversing into my parked car and busting up the bumper. Hard times indeed. Due to all that, and with my downstairs being inaccessible, I have been wallowing in bed playing iPhone games, one of which was Cube Escape Collection.
Cube Escape Collection is made up of nine different escape room games that all take place within the same shared 'Rusty Lake' universe. The games were originally Flash games, but with that format being made obsolete they were saved by being ported. The iPhone is stuffed to bursting with simple escape room games, but with a nice artstyle and tinged with horror this one caught my interest. The collection is free to pay, though you can opt to pay around £2.50 to remove ads that would play should you select the hint option. I paid for this as having spent over an hour playing the first game here and enjoying it I felt I would show my support to the developer.
So, the games are said to all be linked and are varied a bit in what you do. It begins with the fantastic Cube Escape: Seasons. This takes place in a room with a window but no door. Initially you are in the sixties, but by solving puzzles you eventually get access to a black cube that allows you to travel through time to one of three different time periods, two in the seventies, and the final one in the early eighties. The slight story that plays out reveals that a woman may have been murdered in the room. There are some cool mechanics that play with the time element, such as loosening a pipe in the past so that it drips water, then in a later time period fungus has grown under the leak. This follows the format that all the escape room games here did. You have a 2D image of a wall, you can click a button at the side to change your perspective, in total the four different walls as well as the ceiling can be viewed. Maybe it was due to me not being familiar with these types of games, maybe because it is essentially four escape rooms in one, but this took me well over an hour to complete.
Next up was Cube Escape: The Lake. The premise is that you have discovered an abandoned hut by a lake. You're not really trapped in this one as one the walls has a huge opening that looks out onto the water. Fishing makes up a large component of this one, with various lures used to hook different items from the lake bed, including a dead body. This one featured two different endings, but the horror was less than the previous game, and it took me about fifteen minutes to finish.
Cube Escape: Arles takes place in 1888 in Vincent van Gogh's bedroom, with you playing as the tortured artist. Many of the puzzles revolve around solving things related to his paintings, such as the sunflowers on his table, and you even get to slice off his ear! Despite featuring cubes that the other games included, this one felt tangible at best and was notably far less horror based than the two before it.
Cube Escape: Harvey's Box bizarrely has you trapped inside a cardboard box that is due to be moved to Rusty Lake, whether you are shrunk down or not I don't know. Mainly this is horror free, jazz music plays, while external pigeons play a part in the musical based puzzles.
Cube Escape: Case 23 is where the shared universe all comes together in one glorious whole, while also being the game with the most story so far. Playing as a detective investigating the murder of a woman (in the same home as Seasons no less), your investigation takes place over four chapters, so four escape rooms. I admit to being very stuck in the first chapter, but after this point I breezed through it while enjoying the creepy story. All games up to this point are referenced with one of the chapters even taking place in the same room as a previous game.
Cube Escape: The Mill felt like a companion piece to Case 23 as it had some overlaps with that story. It takes place of course in the titular mill location which is made up of three floors. It felt like there was even more of the overarching plot revealed in this one. I did get kind of stuck at times here but the solutions were not that difficult outside of some simple memory games.
Using a handy guide, I had been playing the different games in chronological order, this included playing some external entries in between the ones within the collection. So, after a brief journey over to stand-alone game Rusty Lake Hotel, I was back with Cube Escape: Birthday. I found this one baffling to do and it was all down to not realising an object in the game world was an object and not just part of the scenery. After much searching online I found this out and felt very stupid. This one went to some dark places, dealing as it does with a child's 9th birthday party in which something terrible occurs.
Thankfully Cube Escape: Theatre was a return to form for me, by this point you need to have played the previous games to have any kind of clue what is going on. Needless to say, tis continues the detective's surreal journey of self reflection while giving a new perspective on all the animal people. This is split into different performances taking place on a stage, as such the puzzles felt far more manageable with only one section causing me problems.
After one last journey away from Collection (Rust Lake: Roots), I returned for the final game, Cube Escape: The Cave. This one I was proud of myself for, I frequently hit roadblocks but I persevered and
finished it all without resorting to a guide. This is mainly taking place in two different locations. The first is the titular cave, with the puzzling eventually leading you onto a small submersible out on Rusty Lake. The later mainly involved you using switches and levers to move you sub to different points in the lake in order to collect magical cubes. It sure felt satisfying solving this. The ending certainly feeds back into the overarching story of what has come before, though can't say I entirely understand it all!
With Cube Escape Collection you have nine different games that vary in quality and length. It is easy to see the increase in quality as you play through them, and some feel like the Rusty Lake connections were shoehorned in. Sometimes the puzzles felt a bit obtuse, but there was satisfaction in being able to figure things out. With such a cheap price (free if you keep the unobtrusive ads), and with the hours of content this gave me since I began playing in February, I can do nothing but recommend this.
SCORE:
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