Critical Play: Puzzles | Alone Together
A fun game for escape room & puzzle enthusiasts and a test of communication
For anyone who is bored during quarantine, find a friend and call them for a fun game that will keep you thinking for an hour. This was an extremely engaging game that combined the team spirit of escape rooms with figuring out puzzles. I called my boyfriend over FaceTime and it was a full hour of decoding and question asking. Neither of us knew what the other person’s screen looked like, we each had two different screens and the only way we could escape this puzzle was to communicate everything little detail we had and see if we can make something move.
What I liked about this game is that it took advantage of not having all the clues there. It really tested your communication skills because your clues weren’t visible all the time, sometimes all clues relied on the other person’s board. After reading “Designing the Puzzle” by Bob Bates, I recognized a lot of puzzle mechanics that showed up in this game. It was a combination of many different types of puzzles that made the gears grind. From unusual use of objects to information and code puzzles to information puzzles, it was filled of many different puzzles and forced us to think creatively to figure each piece out.
For the first 15–20 minutes, we were both scratching our heads because we were thinking so individualistically, we were so confused by our own boards that we didn’t know how to engage with the other person. It wasn’t until 20 minutes in we hit our first AHA moment and were thinking “how did we not do this before?!” I loved how this puzzle made you think afterwards about how this wasn’t obvious before, but when you’re in the thick of it, things just don’t make sense sometimes. It truly did take a while before we got into a rhythm and figured out how our two boards communicated.
One drawback I have about this game is that it didn’t have a clear theme. There was no backstory or clear theme, just a puzzle between two people. I would have loved a narrative goal that encouraged you to finish the game rather than just our intrinsic desire to break the puzzle. I believe an obvious theme or backstory would have immersed the two of us even more into characters and added a whole different layer of fun with this game, but despite the lack of this, this was definitely a fun game to play between two players if you just have a computer and a way to communicate with your partner!
