The Experiment: Escape Room

I spend a lot of time in fast-paced shooters where feedback loops are tight and the game tells you exactly what killed you. So when I stepped into The Experiment: Escape Room expecting the puzzle equivalent of clean, readable information design, what I got was the opposite. This is a first-person escape room set inside a creepy doctor's facility, structured around multiple rooms, each with its own batch of environmental puzzles. The concept is solid. The execution is, charitably, uneven. The multiplayer hooks are the most interesting thing here. You can get up to six people into a co-op session and work as a team, or flip it into Versus mode where everyone is locked in the same facility separately, racing to be the first one out. That competitive angle is actually a decent idea, and the free-roam approach to exploration, where you physically walk around and interact with objects, works better in VR than flat screen. On desktop with keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, it gets the job done but loses most of its atmosphere. The animal testing lab section has enough environmental logic that you can work through it without a guide. Search drawers, find misplaced objects, piece together where they belong. When that loop clicks, it's genuinely satisfying for a few minutes. The problems stack up fast, though. Puzzle design consistency is the core issue. Some rooms give you readable cues, others throw objects at you that look completely identical to background decoration and expect you to know they matter. One notorious example involves wiping down a dirty mirror with a roll of tissue paper, neither of which gives you any hint, cursor feedback, or audio cue that they are interactive or connected. That is not difficulty, that is friction. Players across Steam reviews repeatedly report cracking open a guide before the session is even half done. The hint system, when it works at all, reportedly loops the same generic prompt regardless of which room you are in. Items also have a habit of clipping through floors, and in co-op sessions with larger groups, crashes during specific rooms have been a recurring complaint for years with no indication of a fix. Runtime is thin. Most groups who push through finish in well under two hours, and solo runs can wrap in around an hour. That would be forgivable at this price tier if the experience felt polished, but the lighting in several rooms is dark enough that players on some monitor setups genuinely cannot see what they are supposed to be interacting with. Atmosphere is one thing. Forcing players to guess in the dark is another. Steam sits at 53% positive across over 230 reviews, which is not a number that suggests a hidden gem. If you are a puzzle fanatic who does not mind doing homework alongside the game itself, and you have got two or three friends willing to share the frustration, there is a short, scrappy experience buried in here. If you want clean design, fair puzzle logic, or reliable co-op netcode, look at OnSkull's other titles or skip this one entirely. Fred, Scout Team