Champaign-Urbana Adventures in Time and Space: Floor 13

If I copy-pasted in my review for The Lost Temple, CU Adventures’ other digital game, it would need only a little adjusting to be equally suitable for Floor 13 – which, given how much I liked that one, is very much a good thing.

Floor 13 uses the same custom web interface for managing the game. This provides story text (read aloud if you wish), atmospheric audio, and a mixture of static and interactive illustrations that provide the puzzles. These are structured in a series of ‘locations’ that you can navigate between, and there are also panels showing items you’ve found (used and unused), locks remaining to open, and the list of printable pages that have been made accessible. It’s a masterclass in good UI design, and you may barely notice it – because it’s never frustrating, it just seamlessly facilitates gameplay. And even though there are now plenty of digital games allowing full 360° navigable environments, Floor 13’s text and images are at least as effective in building atmosphere and a sense of location.

In this game you’re innocently returning to your mundane office after hours, when things take a spooky turn. It’s a somewhat scary theme but with enjoyably tongue in cheek in delivery, and I liked the incongruous combination of banal office life plus creeping existential dread.

I don’t think I’ve seen a single bad puzzle in any of the games from this company, and Floor 13 kept to that high standard. Although there are twelve pages to print out before starting, there’s only really one puzzle that wouldn’t have worked fine on screen; however, that one was a highlight, so although there’s a printless version I’d recommend playing with the print-outs if you can.

It did feel like quite an easy game, but still took the two of us a full hour (sharing a single screen, not playing from different locations), so there’s definitely no shortage of content; if it felt easy, that was because it was well structured and free of logic gaps.

Like The Lost Temple, Floor 13 is comfortably in the top tier of quality for online digital escape games – you should absolutely give it a go.