I am an addict.
I know I should be getting to sleep, because I’m recording tomorrow. I have to be showered, ready, and on the bus by one, and I want to do some quick laundry before that. Immediately after recording I’m going to my dad’s for his birthday (a birthday on Mardi Gras. How lucky can you get? And he’s jealous of me? I think not, mon papa). So I should probably have been asleep a while ago.
But I’ve been up.
Escaping rooms.
Filling in sudoku.
Solving puzzles.
I am a puzzle addict, friends, I confess. I’ve always gotta have something in my life to figure out. I turn everything in to puzzle, from things like grocery shopping (how can I get out of here in under a half an hour, go up and down every isle no more than twice, completely avoiding the isles I don’t need, going in a zig-zag pattern, and still get everything I need without spending more than $50) to going to the library (if I take the 36D at 2:11 I can be downtown by 2:30 and at the library by three; if I take a 71 bus I’ll take the lower road so I won’t have to walk down Bigelow or cross the street. I’ll be at the library cafe by 3:15, out by 4:30 and back downtown in time to meet Chris for a ride home so I don’t have to ride a crowded 31D home, which means I can only get the amount and shape of books that fit with the ones I’ve already got in my purse, so three thin paperbacks, one thick novel, and a long skinny comic book - GO).
But when I stay home, I have to make these puzzles, so I search me some intertubes. I’ve been doing room escape games like crazy, which, if you haven’t played them, are exactly what they sound like. You’re trapped in a room with a lot of miscellaneous-seeming items, which sometimes are by themselves painfully hard to find. Then you’ve gotta figure out how these items interact with each other, then with the room, which will lead you to more items, and then hopefully out of the room. They. Are. Fantastic. I used to play them all the time and I eventually got really good at them. My favorite was called AMBER: Journeys Beyond which was a whole escape world. You drove to a house on a rainy night and you’re supposed to research the paranormal, and you end up being trapped in the house and the woods surrounding the house. You end up getting sucked into three ghost worlds and you sort of have to make piece with the ghosts before you can get out of the house (but you see, my theory is that you’ve been dead the whole time, because you wrecked your car into the fucking lake, so you never really escape). I hope I still have that game; it’s antique at this point. It was one of the first games I ever had on CD ROM and not a floppy. It was brilliant. If it’s anywhere, it’s at my dad’s. But I digress.
While I was at Joe’s, he showed me a series of room escapes I’d never seen before, the genesis of which was Crimson room, a game which immediately leads into Vermillion Room, my favorite of the series. There’s also White Chamber and Blue Chamber, but White Chamber has no plot and Blue Chamber is pretty contrived. You can find the Crimson Room series of games here My only beef is that they’ve been saying they’ll come out with Pink Prison and Tangerine Room for like...five years now, and haven’t so they probably never will.
My favorite series I’ve found so far are the room escapes by Neutral. They’re beautiful rooms, and the puzzles are good, and with some logic, easy to follow, but still pretty challenging. I got out of Sphere in about 45 minutes, and Switch wasn’t too bad. RGB took a few hours. But the one I’m on now, Vision, kicked my ass. I was doing so well, I opened a door, and then I got locked outside, so I quit that series for the night. I’m going to try again tomorrow. I didn’t bother to save, and I think maybe I should have, but then again, I was locked outside.
A good stand-alone game was Sagrario’s Room which was very different. The puzzles were honest-to-god puzzles and it really made you think about all the items in your list. You’re gonna need a piece of paper for that one.
The only game I’ve actually died in so far (twice) was MuseLock. It’s a pretty quick room, but you can asplode yourself, so it’s at least worth a go. Especially if you like fucking with electrical systems.
And lastly, I’m currently working on Room Marine which is the third in a series of Akarika.net’s rooms. It’s supposed to be hauntingly difficult, but I think I got about a third of the way through before I accidentally hit ‘back’ and wanted to kill myself. So I’ve gotta start that one over and Vision over, but obviously, I won’t have time tomorrow.
Something I’ve noticed is that most of these games are Japanese (which usually doesn’t matter in the scheme of the game, so don’t get discouraged, but there have been a few that I’ve been completely unable to play because of it). Sure, a select few are made by people from English-speaking nations and Sagrario’s Room is Spanish. But the vast majority are Japanese. I wonder why that is. Is it something in the mindset of the Japanese person that is better or more willing to make this kind of game? Or do they just have a lot more free time and more powerful computers? Or are we lazy Americans too busy playing the damn games to take a breather and make one? (For the record, if I had any knowledge of how to work a flash creator to make anything more complicated than a .GIF, I would make my own. But it would be no where near as good as Neutral’s.)
Thoughts? Experiences? Games to share?
That’s all from me for now. Happy escapism, all. I’ve got some sudoku to solve.
But I’ve been up.
Escaping rooms.
Filling in sudoku.
Solving puzzles.
I am a puzzle addict, friends, I confess. I’ve always gotta have something in my life to figure out. I turn everything in to puzzle, from things like grocery shopping (how can I get out of here in under a half an hour, go up and down every isle no more than twice, completely avoiding the isles I don’t need, going in a zig-zag pattern, and still get everything I need without spending more than $50) to going to the library (if I take the 36D at 2:11 I can be downtown by 2:30 and at the library by three; if I take a 71 bus I’ll take the lower road so I won’t have to walk down Bigelow or cross the street. I’ll be at the library cafe by 3:15, out by 4:30 and back downtown in time to meet Chris for a ride home so I don’t have to ride a crowded 31D home, which means I can only get the amount and shape of books that fit with the ones I’ve already got in my purse, so three thin paperbacks, one thick novel, and a long skinny comic book - GO).
But when I stay home, I have to make these puzzles, so I search me some intertubes. I’ve been doing room escape games like crazy, which, if you haven’t played them, are exactly what they sound like. You’re trapped in a room with a lot of miscellaneous-seeming items, which sometimes are by themselves painfully hard to find. Then you’ve gotta figure out how these items interact with each other, then with the room, which will lead you to more items, and then hopefully out of the room. They. Are. Fantastic. I used to play them all the time and I eventually got really good at them. My favorite was called AMBER: Journeys Beyond which was a whole escape world. You drove to a house on a rainy night and you’re supposed to research the paranormal, and you end up being trapped in the house and the woods surrounding the house. You end up getting sucked into three ghost worlds and you sort of have to make piece with the ghosts before you can get out of the house (but you see, my theory is that you’ve been dead the whole time, because you wrecked your car into the fucking lake, so you never really escape). I hope I still have that game; it’s antique at this point. It was one of the first games I ever had on CD ROM and not a floppy. It was brilliant. If it’s anywhere, it’s at my dad’s. But I digress.
While I was at Joe’s, he showed me a series of room escapes I’d never seen before, the genesis of which was Crimson room, a game which immediately leads into Vermillion Room, my favorite of the series. There’s also White Chamber and Blue Chamber, but White Chamber has no plot and Blue Chamber is pretty contrived. You can find the Crimson Room series of games here My only beef is that they’ve been saying they’ll come out with Pink Prison and Tangerine Room for like...five years now, and haven’t so they probably never will.
My favorite series I’ve found so far are the room escapes by Neutral. They’re beautiful rooms, and the puzzles are good, and with some logic, easy to follow, but still pretty challenging. I got out of Sphere in about 45 minutes, and Switch wasn’t too bad. RGB took a few hours. But the one I’m on now, Vision, kicked my ass. I was doing so well, I opened a door, and then I got locked outside, so I quit that series for the night. I’m going to try again tomorrow. I didn’t bother to save, and I think maybe I should have, but then again, I was locked outside.
A good stand-alone game was Sagrario’s Room which was very different. The puzzles were honest-to-god puzzles and it really made you think about all the items in your list. You’re gonna need a piece of paper for that one.
The only game I’ve actually died in so far (twice) was MuseLock. It’s a pretty quick room, but you can asplode yourself, so it’s at least worth a go. Especially if you like fucking with electrical systems.
And lastly, I’m currently working on Room Marine which is the third in a series of Akarika.net’s rooms. It’s supposed to be hauntingly difficult, but I think I got about a third of the way through before I accidentally hit ‘back’ and wanted to kill myself. So I’ve gotta start that one over and Vision over, but obviously, I won’t have time tomorrow.
Something I’ve noticed is that most of these games are Japanese (which usually doesn’t matter in the scheme of the game, so don’t get discouraged, but there have been a few that I’ve been completely unable to play because of it). Sure, a select few are made by people from English-speaking nations and Sagrario’s Room is Spanish. But the vast majority are Japanese. I wonder why that is. Is it something in the mindset of the Japanese person that is better or more willing to make this kind of game? Or do they just have a lot more free time and more powerful computers? Or are we lazy Americans too busy playing the damn games to take a breather and make one? (For the record, if I had any knowledge of how to work a flash creator to make anything more complicated than a .GIF, I would make my own. But it would be no where near as good as Neutral’s.)
Thoughts? Experiences? Games to share?
That’s all from me for now. Happy escapism, all. I’ve got some sudoku to solve.