Board Game Review: Escape Room The Game – Prison Island & Mad House

Escape Room The Game is basically an escape room that you can play from the safety of your own living room. No need to go outside, which is perfect for those cold winter nights where you don’t want to head out anyway.

A lot of different editions of this game have been released already, and this particular one, featuring two different escape rooms, “Prison Island” and “Mad House” is designed for 2 players.

Like in a regular escape room, you have to escape from a ‘room’ (or more like, multiple rooms) in different scenarios. In “Prison Island”, as you might have already guessed, the players are trapped in a prison and have to escape. In “Mad House”, you’re trapped in a psychiatric institution and need to escape.

The concept is pretty nice. Each scenario consists of a big folded piece of paper that you then have to open for the first part of the adventure. Once you escape from that, you have to open the paper further to reveal part two, and so on. The game is best played with the decoder (which you can find in the original game, and which is shown also on the picture).

I like playing these escape rooms – they last about 60 minutes, sometimes shorter if you manage to break the codes faster – and it’s fun entertainment for a family night. However, with these particular escape rooms, I found the stories rather lacking. The plot is too thin. I don’t need a whole background story for why certain events happen, but I need a bit more than ‘oh, you’re trapped in a prison and need to escape’. Now I know that in normal escape rooms, you don’t get a lot of background either, but here it feels like a missed opportunity as it would allow the reader to feel more invested.

Also, and this happened on both adventures, our decoder was acting up and saying we didn’t have the right keys although we did. We checked against the answers on the website, and we did have the right answers, so that was kind of a bummer.

Despite that, we still had two entertaining evenings with this game, though. The first evening, we played the introduction game, “Kidnapped”, followed by “Prison Island”, and the second night, we tackled “Mad House”.

An original and fun idea for date night, since these are aimed at two players.

If you like puzzles and escape rooms, then I recommend reading…

A Study in Shifters (The Adventures of Marisol Holmes Book 1)

“The game is afoot.”

Seventeen-year-old Marisol Holmes wants to live up to the family legacy; after all, she is the great-great-great granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes. What’s more Holmesian than a grisly murder? The Conclave, an underground organization of detectives solving supernatural cases, is giving her just one chance to catch a killer and join them. After all, as a half-blood jaguar shifter, Marisol is uniquely qualified to solve this murder—since every scrap of evidence points toward the culprit being a fellow jaguar shifter.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

There’s more to this than just evidence. Is one of her own people really involved, or is this all a ploy to kick Marisol’s mother off the shifter throne?

When Marisol discovers her handsome best friend, Roan, is missing, she realizes Roan may be the killer’s next target. The stakes just got higher than political intrigue.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Just when things couldn’t get worse, Marisol’s ex-boyfriend-turned-nemesis, Mannix, starts leaving sinister clues for her. In her last case, Mannix broke her heart and ruined her case, and Marisol isn’t sure which is worse. Marisol fears this case too might be far more personal than she could’ve imagined.

“Elementary.”

It’s time for Marisol to prove her worth, or her people could fall into chaos while her best friend loses his life.

This book is perfect for fans of: shapeshifters, steampunk, paranormal, high school drama, teen romance, Sherlock Holmes and deadly intrigue.

Purchase from Amazon.