Games played by San

A slow-paced story-focused audio game, almost RPG-like. Compared to their other games, this one was light on puzzles and exploration and more about experiencing a fantastical world narrated by a voice actor, which is not my favorite balance personally. My teammates liked this one more than I did, though. We got stuck sometimes because not all the actions we needed to take were intuitive. But I enjoyed the puzzles later in the game.

Family-friendly and extraordinarily festive—if you're excited about the theme, this will probably be great fun. Definitely on the easy side, but we enjoyed the final sequence.

An escapey non-time-sensitive videogame with fun puzzles and some creative use of paper printouts. Gotta hand it to them for making an office theme interesting, too. We jumped a gate by accident and solved a puzzle too early, only realizing later, so make sure to follow instructions. We played with three people, and two probably would have been better.

More story-based and less acrostic-based than the average SCRAP/REG game. We liked this one better than the Alien Research Facility, probably because the actors were so great at making it feel immersive, but the visual setting of the lab helped too. We also appreciated the relatively smooth (and touching) conclusion.

This game was really hard, since you have to think creatively and the puzzles are basically language-free. Most of the puzzles were all right but not particularly memorable, but there's one part of the game that made up for its shortcomings and I'm very glad I got to experience it.

Amazingly immersive for an at-home game. It almost felt like being inside a movie for the evening. Definitely worth getting some refill packs and sharing the cost with friends, especially if shipping internationally.

The format was inventive, the actors were great, and it was surprisingly suspenseful and clever. Really innovative experience that I hope influences future games.

A fun online expansion of the Miss Jezebel universe, slightly less risque but still best for a group of adult friends. The storytelling was funny, puzzles were fun and in-world. The gamemaster observed but the game was mostly driven by pretaped/digital interactions. Aside from a couple socially awkward moments, we all had fun (though six people was probably too many).

I liked this format a whole lot—since it's audio-based, we didn't have to constantly check in with the room video like you do in games where there's an avatar in an actual room, so it was easier to focus. I was apprehensive with all the information we got up front, but the gameplay was pretty seamless because we all had our own material to look through and our amazing host/actor was great at improvising nudges to help us along when we needed it. We loved the personalization of having different roles, though it helps to have someone outgoing in the Communicator role and someone well-versed at Picross-style logic puzzles in the Hacker role. With all the different story/puzzle branches, it'd be fun to play again and see what we missed.

A scrappy lo-fi game that nevertheless had some extremely fun moments and clever puzzles. Our GM/avatar really made the experience immersive and memorable.

This game worked super well in the online format, probably better than if we had played it in real life. The gamemaster was fun and helped us all get settled. The inventory system allowed us to all look at different things concurrently even though the camera was only pointing one way. We had lots of fun!

This game started out cool but got really frustrating at certain points. The split team element didn't work so well for us, and one of the final puzzles was hard to make sense of. We enjoyed other Unlock games more.

My favorite of the handful of at-home games I've played so far. Good theme, and the gameplay works well. We ignored the penalties to make it more fun. Who wants penalties if you can help it?

A bit frustrating but fun, especially if you like the theme.

A free classic point-and-click game set in an escape room. Not too hard but required some guessing to make progress. About the length of a regular escape room, maybe less, but cute and a fun diversion.