Escapepolis: Hellevator

From the lobby the burnished metal door to this game gleams at you invitingly, with a 1920s art deco elegance. The story is that there’s an upcoming exhibition on the Egyptian god Seth, and the head curator has been found dead; you just need to take the elevator up to his apartment on the 70th floor to retrieve his documents – easier said than done, of course.

The elevator is thankfully quite spacious, enough that the four of us could move around each other with ease, while still being small enough to still feel like an elevator. The special effects helped there too, building the illusion of vertical movement.

The game concept is fairly distinctive, but what really stood out to me was the way it uses fewer, more complicated puzzles. It’s entirely linear and has no more than half a dozen puzzles in the entire game. However, each of those puzzles (two in particular) are complex multifaceted tasks that involve combining multiple bits of information to produce the one correct answer.

That’s good, particularly for experienced players, in that it gives you something to properly exercise your solving skills on; and when you reach the solution, it efficiently combines everything in a way that gives a satisfying single answer. The downside is that you’re quite likely to spend a while trying wrong answers while working out the contours of the problem.

Hellevator has a dramatic premise and an array of slick effects to evoke peril and heighten the tension. Despite that, the style of puzzles makes it a slower paced experience – you’re not frantically rushing around solving one thing after another in a haze of adrenaline, but gradually cracking each riddle in turn. And those riddles are interesting and intellectually rewarding (though in one case a bit maths-y for my tastes), if more cerebral than expected for a ‘demonic lift’ setting.

Atmospheric, dramatic and sophisticated on one hand, meaty and well-designed puzzles on the other: in both respects Hellevator is a strong game, it’s just that those two elements sit a bit awkwardly together instead of complementing each other.