Between Time: 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, Tested On Humans: Escape Room, and Regular Factory: Escape Room. It is also included in Escape Room Bundle Triple Pack, along with Regular Factory: Escape Room and Wizardry School: Escape Room. Also, it is included in the Escape Room Pentalogy Bundle along with all of the above named games. In addition, it is included in Escape Room Ultimate Trilogy, along with Mystic Academy: Escape Room and Pyramids and Aliens: Escape Room.)

Between Time, the follow-up to Palindrome Syndrome and Tested On Humans, is a First-Person Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2021. 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, Between Time has a better capacity to simulate a sort of scenario where this sort of situation could maybe-sorta’ plausibly happen… if you stretch your plausible deniability a lot. Players take the role of a man breaking into a military-controlled facility to make use of a secret time machine being developed there. A part of this game’s mystery will not only be solving the puzzles to gain access to more of the facility and the structures the machine will transport you to, but also learning exactly what is going on.

The presentation here is mostly good, with some decent lighting and textures, and unlike the prior games there’s some good variety due to the time traveling. There’s nothing truly impressive going on here but it works well enough to present a somewhat realistic-looking environment. Unfortunately, the voice acting and music isn’t nearly as good as Tested On Humans – this game aims for a more adventurous and whimsical tone, with characters who are voiced in a silly, tongue-in-cheek manner. While I understand that some players may have been put of by the more dramatic tone of the prior two games, I don’t think that cringe-worthy cheese is an especially good replacement here.

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 in fact it’s even slower in this game, requiring you to hold down ZL to make it move at anything more than a snail’s pace. And once again, there’s no touchscreen support. This all combines to add 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 Between Time is probably the weakest game in this series thus far, but it 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, although fans of the prior two games may find this game’s tone somewhat disappointing.

tl;dr – Between Time is the follow-up to Palindrome Syndrome and Tested On Humans, and also 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 sneaking into a secret government time travel machine and going to different time periods, which makes for more variety than the prior games, but also makes for a much sillier tone. This game has even more mechanical issues than the previous games, and as a result it’s probably the worst game in the series so far, but still probably worth a look for fans of this sort of game.

Grade: C

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