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Escape Tales: Low Memory
Escape Tales: Low Memory by Jacob Caban and Bartosz IdziKowski and produce by Board & Dice is a revolution in escape room games. Low memory mixes a standard escape room game with a choose your own adventure story driven game with elements of a legacy game thrown in for good measure an includes an app as well. The combination creates a wonderful world, full of puzzles that will have you and your friends working together to solve each puzzle. However, it is more than that as, most importantly, you will need to discover what on earth has happened and why.
The game is split into three parts and I will make sure there are no spoilers. The first character you encounter is Elizabeth Weber. As you work through the game and the many puzzles and rooms you will encounter. A detailed story unfolds. As a group you will be forced to make decisions, each of which may have an impact on the characters and direction of the story.
So, how does it actually work?
Setup:
Check and organise the game, location and stress cards into number order, making sure not to look at the front of the cards as this could provide spoilers.
You place the small game board on the table, this has a grid, that location cards will be placed on allowing you to search locations and providing each part of the location with a specific grid reference.
Set aside the progress and action tokens and have one of the three files, depending on where you are up to available. Load up the app and you are ready to go.
Gameplay
The game comes with a starter, training room that helps you get your head around the basics, a paragraph is read from the file book, location cards are placed on the grid and you are given a set number of action tokens. Please note you never have enough to choose to look at every possible section of a location.
As a group you have to think about what clues you may have been given in previous paragraphs, look around the room and decide which section to investigate. The reference is then matched with the smaller location reference card and this will provide you with a paragraph number form the file you are working through. You read this aloud and it will give you some information, this could be useful, useless or could be part of, or a whole puzzle to solve. In many cases it will instruct you to find one or more cards from the game deck. These will then lead you further into the story, with more information and provide puzzles to solve or items you will need to hold onto until later.
Puzzle Me This
When you are given a puzzle to solve you use the app to locate the puzzle and then type in the answer you think is correct. The app will either let you know if you are right, or wrong. If you are correct, you are given another paragraph to read and your story continues. If you are wrong, it is worth checking you have enough information to solve the puzzle, the app tells you how many cards you need to help solve the puzzle.
Sometimes the puzzles provide you with new items, sometimes they lead to a new discovery, sometimes they may even take you to a new adventure.
As you explore the location, using up your action tokens, you will gain valuable clues. Some of these are items that you can keep. These can come in useful in other locations and can help unlock other parts of the story so careful exploration is key. However, this has to be balanced with the fact that you have a limited number of actions. When you run out of actions you can take a stress card that will provide you with more actions, however, the stress cards do have an impact on how the story unfolds and can even impact how it ends. This creates a real sense of tension and the discussions often focus more on the exploration than the puzzles.
Themed Escape
So what of the puzzles? In terms of escape rooms games I found the puzzles comfortable and not too taxing. Most importantly they were well varied and required a number of different skills so allowed each member of the team to shine. They also fit the overall style of the game and were not so abstract that they made no sense, a failure of some escape room style games. The game is well paced and you can finish a file in a good gaming session 2-3 hours.
The story development is what sets escape tales apart from the rest. It really feels like you are immersed in a world and you are trying to discover, as the characters are, what has actually happened, moving from the current picture to events of the recent past and making many discoveries along the way that are truly shocking. In one of the rooms, the game was able to create the feeling of real threat and impending doom which quickened the heart rate and made us want to solve puzzles faster, it felt like a real time game.
We Did it!
At the end of a file, you can continue, which you will want to do, as you are left on somewhat of a cliff hanger and desperate to learn more. You are able to save the game at any point and come back to it at another point. The insert helps with this along with the rule book that has a handy game save table so you can reset to your previous position easily
Escape Tales: Low Memory was a brilliant experience and one I will be trying again with their other titles. It’s mix of gaming styles, beautifully woven story and clever little puzzles works so well. I was worried the constant dipping in and out of the file to read short paragraphs would be off putting but it works so well and the interaction that it sparked was some of the best co-operative working I have been part of in any gaming group. If you enjoy escape rooms or like a puzzle, if you like games that are immersive and you easily get caught up in a story, escape tales is an absolute must. So sort those decks, open the first file and see if you can, using the memory scanner in the apartment work out what an earth has gone on, not just the night before but why…
