Advert: We were given a pre-release version of this game by Bluekey Games. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.

Today we’re reviewing something a bit different: a digital adaptation of Board&Dice’s first Escape Tales: The Awakening. We were big fans when the original board game came out, so we were super excited for the opportunity to check out Bluekey Games’ adaptation on Steam!

Very very mild spoilers ahead – While we’ve tried to be as spoiler-free as possible and we aren’t going into the game in detail, we will be showing a couple of images from the start of the game to give you a flavour of what you can expect.

Game overview

You’re Sam, a bereft father. Your wife died a few years ago, and now your daughter has fallen into a mysterious coma and the doctors don’t know why. You stumble across another father who went through a similar situation in the past and beg him to help you. He gives you the ominous Book of Rituals, which describes a mysterious ritual on ‘awakening’. The other dad warns you that the ritual comes at a cost, but you’ll do anything to save your daughter…

Escape Tales: The Awakening is an occult-themed escape-style game that has you searching through one eerie room to the next to uncover various items and puzzles. The choices you make – where you search, what you solve, and your narrative decisions – can influence how your game progresses…for better or worse. And there are 8 different endings for you to uncover…will you get your daughter back?

I want to add a trigger warning for the game: it covers dark adult themes, including references to suicide and infertility. If you are sensitive to these themes, this game might not be for you.

How does it play?

This game could not have come at a more perfect time for us. Work and home life has been hectic, so having the time (and brain power) to sit down and set up a board game has been tricky. This digital version of Escape Tales: The Awakening gave us the perfect opportunity to sit down (once the baby was asleep!) and have an impromptu gaming date night. While it’s technically a solo videogame, we linked it up to our TV so we could play through together – it was so easy to set up and worked really well. 

The game has a diverse range of puzzles to solve. These include math-based puzzles, spatial reasoning puzzles, riddles… there was even one puzzle with a bit of spot the difference! And they are pitched at a nice level of difficulty – we found them challenging, but achievable, and this keeps the game fun and not frustrating. We actually remember finding them more difficult when we played the board game years ago, but this was before we’d played a lot more escape-style games, so people new to this type of game might find them more tricky. Don’t worry though, there’s a hint system in the game so if you get stuck you can get some tips.  

What makes the Escape Tales game series unique from any other escape-style games we’ve played is that investigating comes at a cost – each room is divided into a grid, and you have to spend ‘stamina’ for each section of a room you search (once you’ve searched an area, it doesn’t cost any more stamina to revisit that part of the room). Sometimes searching will reveal useful items or part of a puzzle, but sometimes it won’t. When you run out of stamina, you can’t keep searching until you meditate for more. But meditating in itself can affect the story and have its own negative consequences, so it’s tricky to balance how much you search all the nooks and crannies with facing those consequences.

One minor niggle with the searching, though. There are some puzzles that require an image of part of the room to solve. Sometimes, you have to search that part of the room to ‘unlock’ the image. But there are other times where the game will give you this image ‘for free’, once you’ve found everything else you need for that puzzle – on these occasions when you search the area in question you get some story text but nothing else. This is inconsistent, and because you don’t always know whether you’re getting it ‘for free’, you can waste the stamina searching for it. However, this happens very rarely, and in our opinion not enough to impact the playthrough.

The choices you make – where you search, what you solve, and your narrative decisions – can influence how your game progresses…for better or worse.

Another fairly unique aspect to Escape Tales is that there are some choices you can make that genuinely influence the story. There are a lot of games (digital and analogue) that claim to do this, but they often fall flat because what they really give you is the illusion of choice. Like letting you choose how to respond to a character – the resulting conversation might vary, but you still end up with the same outcomes (e.g. getting the same item). Escape Tales is one of the few games I’ve experienced where choice is implemented in a more meaningful way. 

Not all of the items and puzzles are essential to progress through the game, but whether you pick up the items or solve the puzzles can open up (or close off) different opportunities later on. How you choose to respond to characters or choices impact the story later down the line. While the overarching story narrative is always the same (doing the awakening ritual, travelling through rooms to try and get your daughter back), there’s variety in the journey, and 8 potential endings to unlock. There’s enough there to make the game replayable, which again can be uncommon in the escape genre. I would say you would get 2-3 plays with the Awakening before some of the core puzzles feel too repetitive – but even then it’s still worth going through to find bits you’ve missed and unlock other endings. 

If there was one thing we think could improve the game, it would be the option for audio narration. This is a narrative heavy game – which we love! – but it does mean there is a lot of text to read through (especially at the start). Bluekey Games have said this is something they are considering for the future – we hope they do because a (well acted) narration would really help to make the game more accessible, and add to the immersion.

How does it compare to the original board game?

This digital version of Escape Tales: the Awakening stays true to the original board game – the choices Bluekey Games have made to develop it into a digital game work well, and we’ve really enjoyed revisiting the game in this format. It hasn’t been designed to emulate a digital board game, like games on BGA, but adapted to be a videogame. The original board game had some fiddly aspects, mainly with a token tracking system that would need to be reset every time you went to a new room. With the digital game, there’s no digital stack of cards or virtual tokens, no faffy resetting, which for us made the gameplay feel smoother and more immersive.

It uses the same artwork and visual style from the board game, with some subtle improvements (like making the room grid fully birds eye view). It also seems to use the same text, although this does include some unusual translations from the original game. There’s also the odd word that has carried over from the board game that makes less sense in the videogame, e.g. Saying “Take” for an item you wouldn’t realistically take (like a desk), when in the board game you would be taking a card with the desk on it. These occurrences are few and far between, and didn’t detract from our playthroughs.

Bluekey Games have put a lot of consideration into developing Escape Tales: The Awakening into a videogame, and the effort has paid off.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the music. Obviously the original board game didn’t include music. The soundscapes used in the video game are very well considered; the music and sound effects fit with the mood of the game and aren’t overly intrusive, so they really help to immerse you into the game and build on that uneasy atmosphere. You can get a taste for the music from this video (taken from Bluekey Games’ dev diary talking about the music in the game):

Final thoughts

Bluekey Games have put a lot of consideration into developing Escape Tales: The Awakening into a videogame, and the effort has paid off. The puzzles are fun and creative, and the stamina system is innovative. We could see it working well for a small group as well as solo – it worked perfectly as a midweek date night and the dark theme is perfect for spooky season.

For what you get from this game, it is extremely good value for money (the full price is £6.69, but there’s currently a 35% launch offer until 3rd November). Especially with the increased replayability compared to other games in this genre.

Escape Tales: The Awakening is on Steam now (not an affiliated link). If this review has piqued your interest go check it out – then come back and tell us what you think!