Demo out for next month's Escape Tales: The Awakening

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Full version of story-driven puzzler from the creators of Rooms of Realities coming to PC on October 24th

Non-VR gamers were left out in the cold when Bluekey Games launched Rooms of Realities last year, but the indie Polish developer has a broader audience in mind for their next release, Escape Tales: The Awakening, a story-driven puzzler based on the board game of the same name, due out next month. 

The game stars a 35-year-old single father named Sam, who lost his wife five years earlier and now finds consolation only in his daughter Lizzy. But now Lizzy too has inexplicably become ill and fallen into a coma, with doctors unable to help. In his desperation, Sam takes his chances with a mysterious book called "The Book of Rituals," which contains a rite that will allow him to "travel where lost human souls go," another dimension inhabited by creatures called "the Keepers." Despite a warning from the book's previous user about the "high price" to be paid for awaking someone, Sam forges ahead and soon finds himself up against "forces never imagined in his wildest dreams." 

Escape Tales is an illustrated text adventure that combines wordless narration on the left side of the screen and an overhead view of the current scene on the right. This is no visual novel, however, as each of the game's eight main locations represents its own escape room of sorts, with twenty-plus puzzles in total to solve, none of them alike. The playable screen offers a grid-like area to interact with for clues or inventory items using a simple point-and-click control scheme. A handy but entirely optional hint system offers various stages of clues, culminating in the solution outright if need be. What it can't help you with is choosing which "puzzles you solve, paths you take, [or] decisions you make," which will determine the direction of the story and lead to one of more than five different endings. Along the way, a poignant tale of loss and redemption will gradually be revealed, with an option to "meditate" more deeply if you have enough stamina points to endure it. 

The full version of Escape Tales: The Awakening isn't far off, with a scheduled release on Steam on October 24th for Windows PC. In the meantime, you can sample the short playable demo with the game's first location, and perhaps even check out the namesake board game that inspired it.