Escape Room Puzzle Book

I really wanted to love this book as I am a big fan of the physical and board game escape rooms. Each of the 10 chapters is full of clues and puzzles to solve in order to progress the story and move onto the next chapter. However, despite some good elements in the book, there are various issues such as typos and errors that can leave you unable to solve the puzzles without resorting to the solutions page.Pros: The book looks nice, with good quality paper and illustrations. The coherent storyline made me want to progress so I could find out what happens next and I found that some puzzles or whole chapters worked really well together and were a lot of fun to solve. It’s also a really good price, given the amount of puzzles it contains.Cons: As mentioned above, there are some misprints and errors. For example, in chapter 1 the character supposedly finds a 5x5 grid but the page actually shows a 5x6 grid. This created some confusion about whether or not this was a deliberate clue that we were supposed to notice. However, it was just a mistake. Another misprint guides you to the wrong answer for part of a puzzle. These small errors early in the book impacted the overall enjoyment as you can never quite be sure whether you have accurate information or not.The book does promise a challenge although sometimes this amounts to you having to commit to a lot of time-consuming work in order to solve a puzzle. Each section contains a lot of text with different clues and puzzle pieces. The result is that more time is spent working out which clues go together than actually solving the puzzles. There are hints available, but I mostly found that either I already knew the information or that the hints were too obscure to be helpful.I was also confused by the fact that after completing a section, the book will sometimes reveal the code/ answer you have been working on and sometimes it won’t. This leaves you having to check the solutions page just to work out whether you reached the correct answer not.Overall, it’s an interesting attempt although the errors and inconsistencies can be particularly frustrating, especially when they stop you being able to solve the puzzles. I think it would have been improved by paying more attention to the details of the puzzles and sometimes by giving more obvious connections between clues. However, I’ve enjoyed it enough to persevere, hence the rating of 3 stars.

The book, in some ways, is excellent. Well written, great artwork, and there are some really creative, medium difficulty, puzzles throughout.However, the puzzles range from fairly easy, to incredibly complex/ convoluted, and many of the solutions are so abstract/ 'outside the box', that it's not really satisfying when you do get them.I've just got to chapter 3 where you have to link SIX things together to get a padlock code, but there's no hint that these things are linked together in the first place. One of these is a series of letters, which again, isn't suggested at before going to the 'easy hints' section in the back of the book.In short, solutions can be annoyingly abstract i.e) You don't get the 'Ah, of course!' the moment. And far too multifaceted to be achievable without resorting heavily on the hints.

The book is good, it has some interest challenges in it, however the overall story could do with some more structure to it. The whole thing is quite difficult to follow with some bits not quite linking up.

I love a good puzzle, and this is many many good puzzles wrapped up in a series of challenging escape rooms. Lots of visual puzzles, codes to work out, pieces to put together - with hints and solutions at the back if you get stuck. I'm about half way through it at the moment and the going is getting trickier - but there's such a sense of satisfaction when you work out individual elements and then see how they go together. The overall story that links all the rooms isn't too intrusive into the main point of discovering and solving clues, and ties it all together well. I would fully recommend this to any escape room afficionados and people who don't give up too easily.

I bought this book for my mobile 'phone addicted friend who loves the 'room escape' puzzles. The book has been a fabulous success because it is immediately engaging and large enough to allow someone else to look at a puzzle, which has made his problem-solving experience infinitely more enjoyable. The puzzles vary in degree of challenge but not impossible. The concept has been successfully transfered from the electronic versions to paper. Highly recommend.