Escape Room: Too much Lore
Escape Memoirs: Mansion Heist is a puzzle based Escape Room game. If you've experienced the genre before, you know what to expect here. You are put into a locked room with almost zero information and you must find clues to solve puzzles to "escape". In this game, you play as a burglar hired to steal and item, but outside of some starting and ending context (which is wholly unneeded and doesn't really add anything to the game) the game plays out in this format.
There are different things that separate a good escape room from a great one, or a good one from a bad one. These mostly have to do with intuitive puzzle design, puzzles that are relatively simple to solve once you know what is needed, but near impossible to guess, and how much you need to search around for clues.
In a good puzzle game, you shouldn't be able to brute force your way through, and you shouldn't require moon logic (in other words, leaps in logic that don't make sense unless you already know the solution), and they shouldn't require meticulous searching to find clues that provide the needed knowledge to solve puzzles. Great puzzle game should build puzzle on top of each other, and make most solutions based on learning the rules rather than simply solving basic mini-games.
Bad puzzle games have puzzles that, once you know how to solve them, require a LOT of time to input the solution, require meticulous searching for hidden clues, and have a lot of non-sequiters.
Based on everything i played through, this is a "good" puzzle game, but it falls into some traps that keep it from being truly great.
First, the majority of puzzle in this game are more like logic mini-games than puzzles. This may be something you want, but it's not what I look for in an escape room game. Many puzzle don't actually have any real clues about them, they simply want you to logically solve them. Like connecting lines to power a machine, moving blocks into the right sockets, counting color pips, finding weights, etc. Generally I want to have to solve some kind of logic to discover the solution, not have to play a different kind of game several times to open a door. There were also a few times when the clues provided didn't have enough context to be understood, so I had to use the hint system after about 30 minutes of looking over everything and being at a loss. This could be up to me not being good enough, but I've played a good number of these games and usually there is some kind of hint that links things together to help you figure out solutions. Some of the clues in this game don't logically click without a little more context.
On the bright side, all the puzzles work and are very interesting, and several of them had me pulling up my notes so I could keep track of how to put together solutions, and I think that's a great thing in a game like this.
Outside of that, the game is a little hit or miss with the clues and inventory system. You have 6 slots to carry things around with you, which won't get in the way of anything, but it makes it tedious to pick things up and put them down as you make your way through the game. Infinite storage space is usually a given in these games, and it makes it so you don't have as much to deal with to make your way through the game. I believe the reason for this is because you can play the game with multiple people, so it prevents one person from hogging all the items, but a shared inventory would probably resolve this, and since it's a cooperative game, I'm not sure why you'd have separate inventories anyway.
In addition, actually looking at the clues and using them to solve puzzles is sometimes annoying, because you can't pin the clues onto your screen, so you have to constantly back out of a puzzle, look at the clue, then go back into the puzzle. These puzzles are complex enough that this is a recurring issue, so it would have been nice to see a better solution.
With all that said, I do think this is a solid game, and it was satisfying to solve each puzzle, even if they weren't all what I wanted. I'm sure it'd be fun to solve the puzzles with some friends as well, but I don't know if there are any issues playing with multiple people.
The ONLY thing that I think is overtly "bad" is that one of the puzzles seems to have a clue that is wrong. I solved the puzzle by putting in random solutions based on a cheat sheet, because the solution I thought it was telling me to use was wrong. When I found the correct solution, I couldn't figure out how the clue telling me the solution was meant to mean the solution I used. [spoiler]The clue tells you to look at solution C-> D(down arrow), but the actual solution is D-> C(down arrow). Flipping the paper around doesn't work because the letters are pointed in a specific direction, so I really don't know why the clue and the answer didn't line up.[/spoiler]
