The Escape Game: Vol 2: The Silk Road

The sequel to Chasing Hahn continues the story, from which you might be able to guess that while you Chased Hahn you didn’t actually Catch Hahn. This second game picks up where the first left off, and while the game style is very similar it feels more tense and real-time: where the first felt more ‚armchair detective‘, the second is closer to ‚directing a field operation‘.

The name is a reference to the setting, which centres around the inland areas of China associated with the historical trade routes. The shift to the Far East provides theming for the game, with plenty of references to Chinese culture used for both puzzles and for flavour.

This time you aren’t given a package of assets to download beforehand, but there are plenty to unlock in the course of the game. On the whole that seemed a better approach – players need to use the UI to access documents in the course of the game anyway, so better to always provide them that way.

I wasn’t so keen on a particular puzzle that required use of external tools, and which seemed quite ambiguous – but then I realised I’d missed part of the information, which removed the ambiguity. As with the first, solving the game seemed to sometimes involve juggling quite a quantity of data, though less so once you work out which the key things to focus on are.

Silk Road is very much a continuation of Chasing Hahn. Of the two, I’d give a slight edge to Silk Road, mainly because I found the main video character more developed and also more amusing; I think we finished it in a shorter time, though that may be because we were more used to the game style not because it’s easier. But whether you liked the first one will be the main determinant of whether you should get this one.