Game Review: Adventure Escape Mysteries

Hello, I just wanted to add a quick note about the channel before I get into the review. It’s been mentioned to me that people are having trouble with alerts or with being randomly unsubscribed from my channel by Youtube. I just wanted to let you know I’m also having some trouble with notifications on my end.

I’ve had an increase in video comments which is great, I love to interact with you guys, but sometimes my Youtube doesn’t alert me when people comment. I try to check so I can catch them all but yeah if you comment and I don’t reply for a while or acknowledge it I promise I’m not ignoring you, I may just not have seen it is all.

Thank you, and I’ll shut up and get on with the video now. This game was suggested by CyberPunk Girl, thank you again for your request. I was actually pretty excited to try this game, since I have a soft spot for games like this. There are a few, what I call ‘search and find’ games, that have been favourites of mine and this style of game takes elements of those games, the puzzle-solving, finding resources and clues kind of bits.

Adventure Escape Mysteries is a story-based puzzle game, specifically. The gameplay footage might look a little weird to you since I forgot to record my mouse, so if it looks like nothing is happening for a little while it means I was just thinking. It’s not one singular game, though.

It’s formatted in a similar way to the app Episode: Choose your Story, if you’ve ever heard of that, in that you open the game to a library of a few stories and you can choose which one you want. You need keys to unlock each chapter of these stories, you get two keys maximum and once you use one it takes roughly 3 hours to regenerate a new one.

Or you can choose to pay for new keys. In-game there is a hint system, you pay for hints using stars, and you gain stars by completing puzzles and chapters of the story, and finding stars hidden in the levels. The hints are unfortunately not sensitive to whatever puzzle you may be struggling with at the time, as I was having a rough time with one particular puzzle and I spent fifteen stars on hints and none of the hints were relevant to it at all, so I was left with minimal stars and was stuck on the same puzzle.

You can also pay stars to skip puzzles if you’re having a rough time but it costs A Lot. You can pay for more stars too if you need them. I played the Pirate’s Treasure story first, and I found the puzzles on it mostly alright. There were a few that were questionable, the hints being either really really vague or there just being no obvious hints at all for what to do.

Also, one particular puzzle, a battle sequence against monster tentacles, was probably the most painful thing I had to try and do. Each character had a specific area of attack, but one was so awkwardly shaped it made it really hard to do anything useful with it.

You had to eradicate all the tentacles, and they’d thin out pretty well for about 5 moves then all of a sudden there’d be a boost in them. But they reappeared so sporadically and spaced out that it was nigh on impossible to get rid of them all. It took me longer than I care to admit to complete it.

The story for the pirate’s treasure is basically that you are a pirate and you want some treasure that belongs to a legendary pirate called Tiny Sam, but along the way you and your no-nonsense first mate Beatrice lock horns with Kathy, who protects the seas from pirates.

You chase the treasure, follow the clues and try and hunt the treasure down. I like the characters and the story, all the environments were pretty nice and the puzzles were fairly varied. There were quite a few number sequence locks that popped up, and annoyingly those were most often the ones with hints that were quite hard to understand.

I will put my hands up and admit that I did have to cheat on a couple of them for the sake of seeing the story through to the end. The other three stories you get offered are a 3-part series called Trapmaker. You’re a detective called Kate who is super good and surveys all the crime scenes to help her track down the Trapmaker when he makes traps and traps people in a conference.

The third part hasn’t been made yet, but the story for the first part is pretty good. The cost for the stars in this one is a lot heftier and also varies from puzzle to puzzle so there’s sometimes less availability to use hints, which is a bit of a shame because the puzzles in this one seem to be much harder and there are a few where the solution is not very obvious at all, or the solution you think is logically the solution doesn’t actually work.

Again the number-lock puzzle was a very common theme in this one but there was a bit more variety to the puzzles as well. The visuals and backgrounds are, again, pretty decent and the music was suitably thrilling. Unfortunately these are the only two storylines for the game, one of them’s a two-parter set to be a three-parter so there’s a bit more length to it but it’s the same setting.

I think with updates there may be more added but for now there’s not too many story options. However, I got about 6 hours of play out of the Pirate's Treasure story and 6 chapters of the Trapmaker first part so actually you can get a lot of time out the game cumulatively.

As said, I like these style games and for the most part the stories were pretty robust. There were some pretty common puzzle game mechanisms in there plus a few I haven’t seen very often so actually it was quite a nice mix, and the basis of the hints and keys system worked well enough.

It is a strike to immersion to have to play two chapters then wait three hours for a chance at another so if you wanted to sit down and play it for any solid amount of time you might be a bit disappointed, but it’s a gimmick to try and get people to pay money and sadly sometimes Free To Play game makers have to do that to keep themselves afloat a bit.

The art and character design was pretty solid all the way through, the characters were interesting and the dialogue was good. There were a wide variety of environments in both stories, all of them well-designed and appropriate to the setting. The music was good, and the stories were immersive enough to keep me interested despite some long waits between chapters.

Most of the puzzles were decent, none of them were functionally broken but sometimes the hints were a bit vague and could have done with a bit more direction. There's a tutorial at the start of both stories, so regardless of which one you choose to do first, you'll still get a good run-through of how the game works.