Escape Together: Secrets of the Professor

For a first title by the developers, this game is a hidden gem! The rooms are rich with detail, red herrings and of course great puzzles that actually interweave between the rooms too! There are a whole host of accessibility options that make exploring simple and easy to do - including height adjustment on the fly, storage for items on the wrists and also movement options. Whether you play this through alone or with friends, I guarantee you will have an amazing experience! On PC you get a useful option to visually improve the experience too! I played on the highest setting and it performed well and looked great! The game threads together through a very immersive story and gives the experience purpose and meaning! Sssh no spoilers! For replayability your time is recorded and then there is the almost empty bookcase in the main lobby. You will have to see for yourself what that entails..... Don't miss this one, as far as escape rooms go Escape Together is high up on my list! ❤️

Not bad for five bucks! Co-op worked great. There's a funny bug that makes it so you can see the other person's flashlight beam when they've store it in their wrist, but you can't see your own when you do that (except on certain specific surfaces, like the other person's flashlight beam). We were using discord for audio, and we couldn't find a way to turn off the in-game audio, but it was close enough in sync with discord to not matter. Creating a multiplayer lobby was a little confusing at first. There's a place to type a room name, but that's only for joining the room, you get a randomly generated room name when you create one. At one point you are told to use "the secondary button" for something, which in our case meant clicking in on the thumb stick. That opens the menu as well, so you need to use the hand on which that doesn't open the menu. I really liked the way your virtual fingers correctly wrapped around whatever you picked up, based on the orientation you grabbed it. I don't recall if I've ever seen that feature before. The puzzles were good, and we didn't encounter any issues. The only element I found annoying is that you need to search in the dark with a flashlight to find something, and as far as I could tell there was no clue indicating that (although we could have missed it). It took us about 100 minutes to finish, including some goofing around. I appreciated there was no time limit, as some escape room games have, because I'm more interested in exploring the environment than rushing through it. Time limits are necessary for real escape rooms, but that doesn't mean they should be replicated where they aren't needed.

Steam, you really need a neutral option. Along those lines, this is more of a neutral review than a negative one. In fact, if not for one glaring issue, this would actually be a really good game to kill an hour or two with a friend. So, the good. It's a classic escape room with puzzles. Puzzles can be challenging, but are logical, reasonable, and can be figured out with a little thought --- it's actually perfect. I played this with a friend and we had zero problems with the co-op. The real issue this game suffers from is the VR interactions. Objects are difficult to grab. Drawers are difficult to open. Knobs and levers are so hard to grab and hold on to that my friend and I actually abandoned our playthrough and will likely not pick this game up again. Which was too bad because I am curious about the ending, but not enough to subject myself to that kind of frustration. I would say about 2/3 of the time spent in the game was spent trying to just grab, hold, interact with, and use objects. For those curious, both my friend and I play on the Valve Index.