A Walk Down Memory Lane

Last year, I wrote about a new series of "escape room in a box" board games, Escape Tales. The first of the series, The Awakening, introduced a couple of key innovations breaking both with real-life escape rooms and their board game counterparts: a more detailed story, and a relaxed time frame. Those design choices are back in play for the second installment, Low Memory.

Set in the near-future, Low Memory tells the story of a woman whose life is threatened due to her husband's mysterious work in cutting-edge technology. The details, of course, are meant to be discovered in the course of playing the game -- but once again, playing an Escape Tales game is like participating in a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a branching narrative.

Telling a story this detailed goes hand-in-hand with not limiting your experience with a timer, as other escape room games do. In Escape Tales, you receive action tokens and spend them as you see fit to explore potential puzzles. Running out of tokens is how you incur penalties that affect your final "score," encouraging players to be efficient, but not necessarily fast. Take your time to read the story, to discuss possible clues with the other players, and share puzzles with everyone -- because time is not a limiting factor. As with The Awakening, I find this aspect to be the best thing about Escape Tales: Low Memory.

It's possible, though, that the designers (Jakub Caban and Bartosz Idzikowski) leaned into the narrative of the game a little too heavily though. They've got a lot of story to tell, and made a lot of game to hold it: Low Memory is broken up into three separate sections, meant to be played in three different game sessions. The box says that each of these sessions will take you three hours; they certainly took us more than two each. I suppose if you find yourself really drawn into the story, spending as much as nine hours with it might be a selling point for you. I felt like the story started strong, but didn't remain engaging for as long as the gameplay did, petering out before the end.

I think it was perhaps also a bit harder than it needed to be. Low Memory is definitely a more challenging experience than Low Memory. The puzzles are more numerous, more intricate, and more difficult. Again, this will be a selling point for some. Our group felt we had to take clues just a little bit more often than we'd have liked; we do like struggling occasionally so we can feel that thrill of a mental breakthrough, but we struggled enough on this game than some of the team began to check out of the experience to some degree.

Still, Low Memory did have a very satisfying diversity of puzzles. In our group of four players, everyone contributed something critical to a puzzle solution at some point or another, because different puzzles played well to different escape room strengths. And if the story of the game did seem a bit too long, it did at least reach a more satisfying conclusion than The Awakening. Ultimately, your choices do affect how "good" an ending you get, and it may just be that in Low Memory, we made better ones. But where The Awakening had an oddly deflating ending that let down that experience a bit, Low Memory had a good one that for me restoked some of the enthusiasm that had started to flag a bit in hours 7 and 8 of the experience overall.

If you liked Escape Tales: The Awakening, you should definitely check out Escape Tales: Low Memory -- especially if you felt the first game could have been a little more difficult. I prefer the original myself, but I'd still give Low Memory a B. Either one would be a fine place to sample the Escape Tales system if you like escape room games but haven't tried this series.