Waterfall Prisoner

What a great game. Lots of puzzles--some easy, some hard. No glitches with the program. Great music and atmosphere. Lots of value for the money.

This is one of the better representations of escape the room genre. Puzzles are multi-layered and much better designed compared to similar games out there. It also has a very solid atmosphere and good writing. Highly recommended to the fans of this genre. I hope the developer puts out a full blown puzzle adventure game one day.

Waterfall Prisoner is a first person perspective point and click game with a heavy emphasis on puzzle solving. The narrative of the game component is rather thin: Upon starting, the player character finds themselves locked in a damp cell, with no backstory or motivation besides exiting the building. Notes strewn about the Tower give some insight into the inhabitants of the tower and their quirks, as well as some faint lore regarding your current predicament. Nonetheless, the notes are mostly meant to provide information towards solving the puzzles, which are by far and large the focus here. Clearing the roadblocks found in the tower will involve item utilisation, solving basic mechanical puzzles or interacting with contraption setups - their solutions logically deduced from the aforementioned text files scattered through the different floors. Puzzle progression is for the most part straightforward, with a couple instances where multiple riddles might be solved in any order. As it tends to happen with these games, some of the puzzles require objects or hints procured from resolving other puzzles, sometimes thematically unrelated. This means a single, particular obstacle might unknowingly require the player to advance elsewhere and thus it is encouraged to not obsess over a single riddle if there's more to do in the area. The difficulty of the challenges the game presents isn't excessive. Design-wise, the game seems robust enough, with no dead end scenarios a player might accidentally softlock themselves in. Puzzles solved and objects that have exhausted their interactions become "cleared", making it easy to check them off and narrow options down for the remaining riddles. There don't seem to be red herrings to stall progression. The game's visuals are serviceable. This is a small Unity game that extensively employs commercial asset packs. Far from being a cheap asset flip, though, there's been care in putting together a cohesive environment with the available resources and there's enough unique content to give the game its own identity. With the entirety of the game taking place inside the tower, players will be walking around similar looking rooms and corridors, but the game is not long enough for that to become a problem. Music here is mostly ambience - low volume tunes to set up the atmosphere without getting in the way of the player's thought processes. Basic stock sound effects used pertinently, nothing intrusive. In a little throwback to the Sierra brand of adventure games, a little chime plays when the player does something correctly. There's no voice acting to be found anywhere, the journal notes are text-only. There's some unevenness in the visual department of a couple particular locations and one or two puzzles where the corresponding clues might have been better communicated to the player. The inventory system scrolls through the items one by one - not the most elegant solution when the player is nearing the endgame and carries +10 objects. Overall, Waterfall Prisoner delivers an entertaining 4-8 hrs. experience for escape room fans, with a variety of obstacles to solve as the player progresses towards the exit. It's an adequately crafted small project that doesn't pretend to be anything else, and does what it's set out to do.