Tested On Humans: Escape Room

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Escape Room Bundle, along with Palindrome Syndrome: Escape Room, Between Time: Escape Room, and Regular Factory: Escape Room. Also, it is included in the Escape Room Pentalogy Bundle along with all of the above named games as well as Mystic Academy and Regular Factory.)

Tested On Humans, the follow-up to Palindrome Syndrome, is a First-Person Puzzle game released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch later that same year. Much as the game’s subtitle indicates, this game recreates the sort of experience that one would expect from a real-life escape room, with players needing to solve a series of logic puzzles, requiring them to not only figure out the answer to these puzzles, but first figure out the logic behind each of them.

Unlike an actual escape room, players will need to solve the puzzles alone, they won’t have friends or an event organizer to look to for assistance. They also won’t be given any sort of time limit. However, unlike most escape rooms, Tested On Humans has a better capacity to simulate a sort of real-world scenario where this sort of situation could maybe-sorta’ plausibly happen – players take the role of a woman named Alex who wakes up in a research facility seemingly used to perform cruel and dangerous experiments on people. A part of this game’s mystery will not only be solving the puzzles to gain access to more of the facility, but also learning exactly what is going on.

The presentation here is mostly good, with some decent lighting and textures. There’s nothing truly impressive going on here but it works well enough to present a somewhat realistic-looking environment. The voice acting here is pretty good, with Alex reacting with surprise and horror as she discovers more of the strange and alarming nature of the facility she’s in. This game generally isn’t aiming for a tone of horror – it is generally well-lit and non-threatening (although there do seem to be alarming blood spatters and cryptic messages scrawled all over the place), and the gameplay is backed by dramatic music, but it’s seeking to create a tense tone, not an alarming one.

As for the gameplay… well, this is about what you’d expect from an escape room, all right. Each of the puzzles exists within its own sort of logic, and half of the challenge is figuring out that logic. Some of these puzzles will undoubtedly seem exceedingly easy, while others just won’t make any sense until you really think about it… or consult a guide online. Players will generally get only one hint per puzzle, and if you need more than that, you’ll have to look it up online.

Unfortunately, the cursor speed here is a bit on the slow side, and there’s no touchscreen support, adding just a bit of tedium into the process of working on this game’s puzzles. However, this gripe aside, it all functions well enough. The game even warns you when you are trying to work on a puzzle without yet having all of its pieces.

Overall, I think that Tested On Humans, like Palindrome Syndrome, will likely satisfy those who are looking for exactly the sort of experience it seeks to deliver – a videogame version of an escape room. It doesn’t do anything truly revolutionary for the genre, and has some annoying flaws, but if you approach it with a fair amount of patience (and perhaps an online guide), you will likely find it lives up to your expectations, and I would argue it manages to be slightly better than its predecessor due to the inclusion of at least some semblance of a hint system, as well as a more engrossing atmosphere.

tl;dr – Tested On Humans is the follow-up to Palindrome Syndrome, and as such it is a First-Person Puzzle game that aims to recreate the experience of an escape room, and it largely succeeds. This game features a theme that has players waking up in a facility where apparently deadly experiments were performed on people, and you must solve puzzles to escape. This game is not without its flaws, and the help function is still somewhat lacking, but overall this game is worth a look for Puzzle fans looking for a videogame version of an escape room experience, and I would say it’s a slight improvement over its predecessor.

Grade: B-

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