Cabin Escape: Alice’s Story

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Cabin Escape: Alice’s Story is a Graphic Adventure in the “escape room” style released on mobile devices in 2014 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players take the role of the titular Alice, a woman who suffers from some unexplained memory issue, and whose husband has left various puzzles for her to solve as a thinking exercise intended to help with her memory, and which she will need to complete in order to leave the cabin.

Before going on, I feel something important needs to be addressed here – Cabin Escape is not a full game. Rather, this is a brief prologue (perhaps a half hour long) to the episodic game Forever Lost. However, the short length of this “game” and its incomplete nature is somewhat excusable – it is only $1 on the eShop, after all.

Graphically, Cabin Escape features static pre-rendered visuals that are dated and not at all impressive, but sufficient for the purposes of this game. These are joined by occasional sounds when interacting with objects, and a surprisingly loud constant roar of crickets in the background, along with an occasional owl hooting. There is no music here. More than anything, the cricket sounds become very grating very quickly.

As for the gameplay, this is fairly straightforward Graphic Adventure fare – nothing especially fantastic, but nothing horrible either. The logic of some of the puzzles is somewhat odd and elusive, but to the game’s credit, it has a decent built-in hint system to help guide players to the next step in whatever puzzle they’re working on. Really, my biggest issue here is the controls, which seem unintuitive and repeatedly had me accidentally taking an in-game photo or accidentally leaving an area when I only meant to close a menu window.

Apart from a few odd quirks and issues like this (and one error message that popped up when I deleted the last of the in-game photographs I accidentally took), Cabin Escape is a decent little bite-size Graphic Adventure game. It’s nothing extraordinary, but for fans of the genre looking for a quick fix on the cheap (or a preview of the Forever Lost series), this will probably be worth the $1.

tl;dr – Cabin Escape: Alice’s Story is a Graphic Adventure in the “escape room” style. This $1 game is not a complete game, but rather the half-hour prologue to the Forever Lost episodic series. Given the low price, this is forgivable, and the game itself is decent if a bit dated and marred by some control issues and a few bugs. Overall, this won’t truly amaze anyone, but fans of Graphic Adventures looking for something fast and inexpensive may find this to be a decent distraction.

Grade: C

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