Coded Chronicles: The Shining - Escape From The Overlook Hotel

Convoluted game. Items in envelopes mixed up and duplicated. Not worth the trouble.

My wife and I have played every Unlock game, every Exit game, every escape the room the game, both werewolf games, and even the Choose Your Own Adventure games if that even counts as an escape room.Plus, we played the Scooby Doo game by the same publisher and thought it was fun. I gave the Scooby Doo game to a friend so he could play it too because it did interesting things.This game, is unplayable. Please listen. This game is unplayable.I've looked through the boardgamegeek forums and found that other people have had problems that make the game unplayable that I even haven't run into yet. I can't think of a time we have stopped playing a game mid play, but that's what we have done here after about 90 minutes.1) If you use the hints, they are wrong and let me tell you that it is hard to even know what hint to read.We had a room. We knew basically what to do but couldn't make it work. We tried to look up the hint and didn't realize that this room technically counted as switchboard puzzle 2, because this did not at all involve a switchboard. The solution told us that certain room elements formed a number 4, but I will tell you that they form a number 6. Eventually we just read the solution and the solution gave the numbers _in the wrong order_ so they lead to nowhere. the solution is like 34XX and the actual solution is something that starts with 4.2) You will stumble upon solutions for future puzzles by pure accident.A) We used a knife on an option and all of a sudden we were reading an entry that was clearly far in future. They should number the things so that this can not happen. Turns out if you use a knife on a bulletin board, it opens up a window.B) We ran into a situation where we got a card with a four digit number printed directly on it. We read the entry to that number, and we were taken to an entry that didn't make sense given where we were in the story. Turns out, the only reason for that was we completely skipped a puzzle. Once we completed that puzzle it was basically like "hey i hope someday in the future you get a card with a number on it". And so we actually were in the right place.Even with these two points above, I feel like I have not yet captured what it feels like to play this game. It feels bad. Please do not play it.

First the idea of this game is awesome and you think it is close to being there and then you realize that the whole game is flooded by shotty puzzles that are so whackadoo you don’t get them, errors in spelling, ERRORS IN LOGGED ENTRIES that you need to play the game. And then my favorite they replaced envelope 5 with a duplicate 6…I feel like a bunch of drunk frat boys came up with this. Good idea and then failed to follow through and left you with a sad feeling you didn’t get the great game you thought you got when you set it up.

It's really a huge problem that defeats the entire purpose of this product for it to have so many errors. Half the game in this type of product is staring at things for long periods of time to try to figure out what they mean and whether or not you have enough information to work it out. In this case, you'll be stuck staring forever because there are literally errors over and over again on really crucial things. I'm going to return it, but hope someone from the company just actually tests it out, hires an editor, or something. This has the potential to be awesome. Right now, it's awful.

Worst escape room game I’ve played. We ran into the same troubles as other reviewers, and it ruins the whole game. The game makers really needed an editor here. Terrible typos dead-end the game, and the hints are very unclear. This is really too bad because the tiles and pieces are very cool. Get the Scooby Doo escape game instead if you want one by this company.