Escape from the Aquarium

We found Escape from the Aquarium on the way home from our Sedona trip.   It looked cute and we didn't notice at the time that it was an escape room game for kids.   Or main issue with escape room games is that the pieces get marked up or ruined during the course of the game,  so it's hard to play them a second time.   And knowing the outcome spoils the replayability.  Escape room games are not really games, they are sets of puzzles.

The art is bright and friendly.  The story is a bit silly: you get turned into a fish while visiting the aquarium and have to swim around looking for clues to get magical ingredients to get back to human form.   Okay.

There is an answer book and hint book, both of them with scratch off spaces, so there's the main component that can't be restored to its unplayed state.  There are four folders full of clues but you have to dump all four folders together, since the stuff you need to solve puzzles in one folder are in some other folder.

Each puzzle gives a three digit number that you have you enter into the decoder ring to see which answer space you have to scratch off.  It's well done.  The decoder ring was a bit loose, so the numbers didn't always line up well.

The puzzles are mostly pretty simple: find the numbers on castles or fish, or find matching fish.  One puzzle had a group of red octopi whose legs all curl together but you can follow them to the three numbers you need.  One had you walking a specific tour on the map.  One was a classic number pyramid where each space is the sum of the two below it.

There was a puzzle to add up all the little receipts found in the folders.   And one card showing which fish to connect with lines on the big submarine view.  We did not solve this last one while playing the game, but I saw the solution when looking at the photos I took.

My favorite was where you had to piece together tiny scraps of a coral, and the fingers ended up pointing at specific numbers.  That was clever and precise design work.

We found the puzzles challenging enough,  with only one that didn't work out.   Here you were supposed to put fish cards in their spaces then match the tiny icons around the edges with letters.  This gave us gibberish for some reason.

We got tired after about an hour and stopped scratching off answers to preserve the pieces. In the end, you just want to solve all the little mysteries.  We didn't need to know the names of imaginary ingredients, but that was a reasonable way to tie the puzzles together for the target audience.