Escape Hunt: The Lost Temples (iOS) Review

Escape Hunt: The Lost Temples opens up with the player in search of the famous Professor Antoine LeBlanc who is professor in something that was doing, er, something. It doesn't matter in the slightest, and the plot is essentially the loosest of all possible explanations for tying all these puzzle rooms together. This has a plot like cereal commercials have a plot. Yeah, it's technically there but no one is actually interested in the antics of a cereal fanatic rabbit in a commercial or faceless explorer in throwaway adventure games. This actually has less story than that, because there is no real middle or conclusion to it - just a handful of lines at the beginning to provide some context.

This by itself isn't a deal breaker, but for the most part people enjoy adventure games for one of two reasons; either because they like story heavy games and adventure games serve as a great framework for that, or because they like challenging puzzles and games that offer a more cerebral experience. Without any semblance of a story, this seems to be relying entirely on its puzzles, which is a problem because they aren't that impressive. Action is divided up into a series of rooms, each containing a puzzle or two, with the overall objective to escape the locked room and move on to the next area. It is advertised as actual physical room escape locations all over the place, so it might be tempting to believe that the puzzles here would be comparable to what would be expected from one of these locations. That is not the case, unless there is some room escape area out there designed for small children.

The biggest issue is that the puzzles are thoroughly unremarkable. A lot of them sort of solve themselves. The opening one is essentially fitting oddly-shaped pegs into corresponding oddly-shaped holes, which feels like something that should be featured in Dora the Explorer and not in a game meant for people older than primary school age. Things do increase in difficultly a bit over this, but not a lot and there is really only one puzzle in the entire game that takes even a little bit of thought. It involves moving coloured balls to the other side of the board with some limitations of movements, and it is the only one that is even remotely satisfying to solve. This feels like the kind of title designed specifically for casual fans, so people looking for a simple, straightforward release might actually be satisfied with what this is offering. The puzzles aren't too hard or complex, but it feels like it could merely be used to kill some time on a bus ride. At the same time, this isn't something anyone is really going to be eager to sit down and play.

Much of The Lost Temples just sort of comes down to walking around and picking things up. Movement is controlled by tapping around on the screen, which works most of the time but can cause some frustration, especially when trying to manoeuvre somewhere specific. When picking up, puzzle solving, and movement are all controlled by the same sort of action, it's just going to lead to trouble at times because of confusion on the screen and that is certainly the case here.

It isn't game-breaking and for the most part everything works out most of the time, which is good because slowly walking around and picking things up takes up a big chunk of the game. These items aren't hidden, or anything like that, but they are needed as pieces of the puzzles that have to be solved. It's less fun and more a chore that needs to be completed before getting to the puzzles, like the game is punishing the player for not cleaning their room. A lot of rooms just easy a handful of obvious items to pick up that are then used in the very obvious corresponding puzzle, and out of this very basic setup, Escape Hunt ends up providing a handful of very straightforward puzzles. Taken as a whole, it is just a thoroughly inoffensive but uninspired puzzler that will likely leave most people wanting more.