This game puts the players collectively in the role of one man, Sam. After the death of his wife, he faces a new trauma when his daughter falls into a coma. Desperate for a solution the doctors cannot provide, he performs a strange ritual that begins a sort of vision quest. Passing through various "rooms" representing his life (and his wife's and daughter's), Sam must gather the items that might awaken his little girl.
There's a lot to like about this game, but what I found most novel were the ways in which it didn't try to faithfully recreate the escape room experience. Story is always threadbare in an escape room. There's certainly a theme to each room, but the "story" of why you're there and what escape means is generally (and rightly) a paper-thin lampshade hardly necessary to the experience. The Awakening (ostensibly the first of an "Escape Tales" series) endeavors to present a complete and legitimate narrative. It comes with a book of 100+ numbered story snippets; as you work your way through the game, you read new parts of the story as you would with a Choose Your Own Adventure book. You truly do make decisions that affect the narrative (and not always in immediately obvious ways).
Most intriguing of all, time is not a factor in this game. In every other escape game I've played, you're either put on a strict time limit, or scored at the end based on how long it took you to complete the game. Escape Tales makes the simple (yet not obvious) tweak: why put you on a clock? Actual escape rooms are trying to move through as many customers as they can, resetting the room multiple times a day for each new batch of patrons. But what's a board game's financial incentive in forcing you to complete it in an hour?
This game declares a run time on the box of 3 to 6 hours, which you can do in one sitting or across multiple sessions (by writing down key information to "save your game"). By not making you race against the clock, the game encourages much more involvement from all players throughout the experience. If one player struggles with a particular puzzle, nothing is lost in giving the other players a chance at it. Even if the second player stumbles too and the original player susses out the solution, all that's happened is that more people got to participate. It's nothing but upside. And there's no pressure to solve multiple puzzles at once; each person playing the game can watch every bit of the gameplay.
Those puzzles are quite well-crafted. They're tough, but they're generally not too tough. They rely on all different sorts of skills and intuition: math, observation, pattern recognition, geometry, logic, and more. It's a rather impressive variety generated just by illustrations on cards, and it really gives everyone a chance to shine, no matter their escape room strengths.
My group broke up the experience over more than one evening, and after the first session, I was ready to declare this the best escape room board game I've ever played. But ultimately, I'd come to have a reservation. The game purports to be replayable. It does this in a few ways. One is by including more puzzles than you'll encounter in a single playthrough. We did about 80 to 85% of them when we played, and while that does leave 10-15% untouched, I'm not sure if that's enough to go back and replay for.
Also, there are multiple endings. The one we got to (and, we checked, the other two we could have gotten to) are "bad." Essentially, you lose. While on the one hand, it's a totally reasonable thing for you to be able to lose a cooperative game (that's sort of the point of those), I'm not sure it's reasonable for you to lose such a game when it has no random elements. Playing it the second time won't really be different. You can make a few different choices in the moments that a choice is presented, but the puzzles will all be the same. If you remember them, there's no mountain left to climb. Sounds pretty boring to me, and as much as I enjoyed playing, I really can't see myself playing again for the right ending. Not, at least, in say the next year or two, while there's still a good chance I remember particulars about the puzzles.
Until the unexpected "you lose!" at the end, I was on track to give Escape Tales: The Awakening an A-. That definitely affected my view of it. But the bulk of the experience is still quite fun and satisfying. So I'm going to give the game a B+. If you've enjoyed the Exit: The Game series (or any other escape room games), you should definitely check this one out.
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