It’s the year 2050. You & your fellow scientists are working to solve the world’s many crises. And you seem to succeed by developing R.A.I.N.B.O.W., an AI that seems to make the world a better place for everyone. Until it doesn’t…

In Apocalypse, work your way through a series of puzzles to save humans from the awry AI. Each turn of the page progresses the story and has a new puzzle to solve.

What works well:

• Each puzzle is different & similar to ones you find in escape rooms. Matt particularly enjoyed this, as he’s less of a fan of ‘traditional’ puzzles. I like that some puzzles are interactive & require cutting out/manipulating. And they were the kind of puzzles we could work on together.

• It was fun to have an overarching story to follow, that was relatively well written.

• The hints do a good job of pointing you in the right direction. And the solutions explain how to get to the answer (not just what the answer is).

What doesn’t work well:

• The puzzles felt either super easy, or ridiculously hard (I mean figuring out how to solve them. The actual doing is straightforward when you know what you need to do.)

• Although the puzzles thematically relate to what’s going on in the story, they don’t feed into the story in a meaningful way. It would feel more like an escape game if answers were used in future narrative or puzzles.

• One puzzle needs a protractor – so people would need to own one, buy one or skip that puzzle. A makeshift protractor should be provided within the pages.

Final verdict:

It’s not the same experience, but Apocalypse’s puzzles feel closer to escape-style puzzles than traditional ones. So if you enjoy EXIT games or similar, you might also enjoy this puzzle book – although expect to need a lot more hints! And don’t expect the puzzles to interact with each other.

Apocalypse might not be the perfect escape room book, but we certainly had a perfectly fun time working through it together. And while we don’t often talk price points, it’s currently £4.99 (Amazon), which seems good value.

I’m looking forward to trying more puzzle books from this author 😊