RC Escapes – A Christmas Carol

RC Escapes – A Christmas Carol
Location: Online
Game Date: 20/12/2020
Team: Amy & Ian
Duration: 60 Minutes

Theme:
“Scrooge was a cold uncaring man, he was happiest being unhappy and even happier when others were miserable. On Christmas eve, Scrooge is visited by three spirits to teach him to mend his ways. The fate of Scrooge lies in your hands… “

A Christmas Carol was produced beautifully, with an easy to navigate interface, and slick yet charming graphics. There was certainly a dickensian air about this game and with a full range of sound effects and multi media it was hard not to be drawn into the story, which was told well, and stayed true to the tone of the classic christmas tome.

Game Play:
A mostly linear game, that had a good assortment of puzzles, word, observation, logic, phyiscal, searching and maths.
Puzzles were good in their logic and faithful to the story, leaning with a bias towards maths in this particular game. The puzzles encouraged team work, but there was also moments where players could split up and “do their own thing” (If you can divide and conquere I would advise to, there’s a lot to get through in this game) There are a few puzzles in “A Christmas Carol” That you would expect to find in a click and point escape room, and that put the pressure on when faced with a hard time limit.
Now, I don’t normally talk about difficulty in my reviews, as on the whole this is a very divisve and subjective matter, but “A Christmas Carol” is penned on the website as “hard” and I would say… It is.
We flew through both of RC Escapes previous games in around 30 minutes, this game we struggled on. The game opens on a really tricky maths puzzle, and doesn’t get any easier from thereon in, that’s not to say it’s bad. It’s a very good game, the puzzles are logical, and have cohesive answers with no ambiguity what-so-ever.  It is just the definition of HARD!
Part of the difficulty in “A Christmas Carol” was down to the signposting, there were moments in the game where we just had NO idea what we were supposed to be doing and it was through a fair amout of trial and error that we discovered the direction we were to take (this definietly aided in ramping up the difficulty for us, at least)
However, there were many good moments of signposting, and it was not all wild stab in the dark!
Flow was lovely and the interjections of video and audio served to futher the story whilst not disrupting the gameplay.
“A Christmas Carol” is not for the faint-hearted but it is a satisfying, yet taxing game!

Clue System:
Clues were available at the click of a button, but beware, EACH clue taken will add 5 minutes of time onto you escape time at the end. There is also an option to skip a puzzle too, if it’s all getting a bit too much.

Did we escape?
Yes, just

Website: https://rcescapes.co.uk/
Price:
£12.50