Escapepolis: Gustav Eiffel

Our second game at Escapepolis’s Galatsi branch had us going for a meeting with our childhood friend, the famous builder of the Eiffel Tower. Naturally, the meeting took an unexpected turn and left us trying to avoid being arrested for murder. This original premise takes place high up on the Tower, though some suspension of disbelief may be needed to imagine a vertiginous drop outside.

The story though is front and centre, and provides some of the most memorable moments of this game, in the added drama and the way that interacts with your environment. It did also lead to the most frustrating section of the game though, where a puzzle that struck us as a bit of a reach left us bottlenecked in darkness a little too long.

As with the other room we played at the venue, G. E. has a linear structure and tends towards fewer puzzles that each involve more intersecting elements. That said, where in Hellevator each element of each solution was rigorously determined by the clues, here it’s a bit looser, meaning you may be uncertain whether to try to find an order in which to input a set of answers or just enter them all together. Even so, the result is that although it may sometimes take several attempts and missteps to crack a puzzle, it’s generally a satisfying achievement when you do so. That’s particularly true of the final large puzzle – we chased a few plausible but wrong approaches first, but when all the relevant clues came together they did so with the inevitability and neatness of a watch mechanism clicking into place.

It might have been nice to have some greater resolution to the plot, which left unanswered some questions about what had happened, but that’s a minor quibble. For me it’s a split decision between Gustav Eiffel and Hellevator: I thought Eiffel had a couple of shakier points, but a bit more pace and some very cool sequences.