You can escape this room, but you will never escape Google Docs

For anyone who has been fortunate enough to spend most of the pandemic working from home, the idea of ​​escaping from the living room (or sofa) that has become a makeshift office is probably identifiable. Enter this series of “escape rooms” built on Google Docs, which allow you to do just that, within web software that you’ve probably become familiar with. The “Part 3” of the game was finally released today, but you’ll never completely escape Google Docs.

“Escape: A Game” by Anthony Smith has the style of a game of choosing your own adventure in a series of interconnected Google Docs. You “wake up” from a mysterious dream in a smoke-filled cabin and have the task of leaving. “Part 2” has you doing the same thing in a hotel corridor, and “Part 3” you just released today, I am not going to spoil it for myself or anyone reading this. We’ve seen other escape games created in Google’s software before, but “Escape” has a strange and scary charm that is hard to deny.

As cool as it is, Google Docs is not the best place to play. Clicking on links in Docs can take several clicks to actually take you somewhere else, and the new tabs increase quickly. I could tell that my laptop was overloaded with the number of tabs that I had opened for cross-referencing and dialing the game phone. What is a good advantage of playing in a collaborative word processor is the possibility of getting help in solving puzzles. Both “Part 1” and “Part 2” feature pages that double as guest books for people to leave their names and help each other solve puzzles. You need to request access to edit the “Part 1” page, but even without live edits, it is still useful for tips.

The actual narrative at the beginning of “Escape” is small, but leaves a lot of space to fill the strangest edges with your own connections. For example, during all the time I played, I couldn’t shake off the similarities between the game’s smoke-filled booth and To control“Oceanview Motel”. what To control level featured an escape room-style puzzle and functioned as a threshold space in the game to which you returned several times. “Escape” doesn’t have the cool visual aesthetics of To control, but there is some inheritance shared in its strangeness.

I spent about an hour working on the first part of “Escape” and ended up with more than 50 open guides and a very strange story on YouTube. I learned some facts about dentistry, I was frustrated with myself for not remembering all 151 original Pokémon, and I was increasingly concerned that this was all a trick to make me better understand how the links work in Documents. In short, it is not a bad way to spend some time online

“Escape: A Game” can be played for free on Google Docs. “Part 1”, “Part 2” and “Part 3” are now available for your puzzle solving pleasure.