A Co-op Escape Room Where One Player Gets The Short Straw
It serves me right for not doing my homework. I tend to get the itch to do an escape room, so I threw my hand up to review How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine. If I’d spent any time at all doing research before that moment, I would have realised that this was a co-op only experience. Even more so, I’d have learned that one of the players was required to use a mobile phone or tablet. Unholiest of Jackbox horrors: I’d committed to doing an escape room with a friend.
It was all good in the end. It turned out I did have one of those, and they even had a smartphone. An added bonus: only one of us needed to have bought the game, as the companion app was completely free. Crisis averted.
The Hunt for Red October
Talking of crises, there’s a rather big one at the heart of How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine. The Triumphant, the lost submarine of the title, is out of communication range having been given the order to strike its enemies. Leadership has had a change of heart – perhaps initiating thermonuclear war wasn’t a great plan for a Monday morning – so you are to find The Triumphant and rescind the order. All very Ethan Hunt.
This would be difficult without The Triumphant being a hotbed of puzzles and riddles. Every step through the engine rooms, captain’s cabins and torpedo bays of the Triumphant is punctuated with puzzles that need two people to resolve. One of you is walking around the submarine, and the other is – we assume – on the surface with their tablet, relaying information where necessary.
We suspect that there is a right and wrong way to play How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine. We played the wrong way. We sat, side by side, on the sofa, checking each other’s screens and collaborating. We get the feeling that Breakfirst Games would rather we were in different places entirely, trying to describe scenarios and information to each other without seeing them. It’s up to you: we went the coward’s route, but it’s entirely possible to go the brave route.
The Killer App?
So, what’s the tech like? Does the whole cooperative thing, tablet and TV, work well? The answer is a confident yes and no.
We say yes because aligning with each other was surprisingly friction-free. We expected some kind of bluetooth-style synchronisation, but it’s nowhere near that complicated. Starting a new game, you each press the GO! button at the same time and the cutscene plays in rough synchronicity. Yellow post-it notes are attached to each puzzle, and there is a terminal on the app to type codes so you are focusing on the same thing. Even restarting from a save point is simple. You type in the code on each room’s door to bring the companion app up to date.
We say ‘no’ because the app never stopped feeling finicky. While the Xbox side of How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine always felt clean, chunky and intuitive – a joy to play, in short – the app always felt noisy with stuff. There’s just too many options on its Gameboy-like green and black screen, and they are never ordered in a helpful way, or with particularly readable icons. We suspect that this is somewhat intentional: that the app-player is intended to rifle through slightly archaic systems like they’re Lex in Jurassic Park. But we felt that the weighting was off. With more focus on the puzzles and less focus on turning the app into its own puzzle, the second player would have had a better time.
Not a great start, then. There was a lot of tutting and huffing from our partner, and there was always a sense that one of the two players got the rough end of the gig.
Puzzle Perfection
What perked us both up, then, was the sheer quality of the world and the puzzles inside of it. I’ve got a real fondness for the chunky readability of the submarine. Stuff that’s irrelevant is dark and cross-hatched (reminding me of the underrated Escape Academy), while the interactables are bright and pulsating with power. Collectible enthusiasts will also be happy to see hint tags hidden in the environment, offering achievements if you find them all.
But it’s the puzzles that get several thumbs up. In most cases they’re wonderful knots that two people need to pull on to untangle. Quite a few reminded us of playing Spaceteam back in the day, with one player having a dashboard of some form, and the other player having the commands. One barks at the other, hopefully in a pleasant manner, and the task gets done. Other times, both players will have dashboards, and the coordination is simultaneous. There’s a particularly good one in the Torpedo Room that is a neat test of whether you actually read carefully.
There are logic puzzles where you both have clues, but no single person has all of the information to solve the puzzle. Our favourite was in the mess hall, where we had to identify the crew through a combination of moustaches, ageism and brotherly relations. On other occasions we were building up a language of symbols, sharing our combined understanding of what a sequence of swirly symbols means.
This is where the skillset of Breakfirst Games really sings. They really know how to make Mensa mindtwisters for two players. Sure, they aren’t infallible – there are a couple of duffers, including a too-long maze and a puzzle that requires the pressing of a button dozens of times – but they are the exceptions.
The Crimson Tide
Which is why it’s such a shame to end on a sour note. Our experience – and we’re not entirely sure if this is common (since the internet seems not to have had the same problem) – was that How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine was exceptionally buggy. In one room alone (the Torpedo Room) we hit three separate gamestopper bugs. The game was determined to throw up Controller Disconnection notifications even when we were clearly still interacting; a panel refused to open; and a screen zoomed in erroneously, to the point that we couldn’t see vital info. They were intermittent – on repeat playthroughs we didn’t experience them. But we had to play this room five separate times, and by the end we felt defeated.
Fingers crossed that the bugs don’t surface like a Russian submarine. Because if they don’t, and you have a friend who is willing to take on the less glamorous (and less enjoyable) companion app role, then How 2 Escape; Lost Submarine is actually a bit of an escape room gem.
Those are hefty caveats, though – almost enough to sink the whole experience. So, consider it a warning: How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine is a supremely well-designed escape room for two players, but it’s got a weakness in its companion app, and the game has a tendency to spring a buggy leak.
Important Links
Team Up or Sink – How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine Delivers a Unique Two-Screen Puzzle Night! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/team-up-or-sink-how-2-escape-lost-submarine-delivers-a-unique-two-screen-puzzle-night/
Team Up or Sink as How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine is Unveiled – https://www.thexboxhub.com/team-up-or-sink-as-how-2-escape-lost-submarine-is-unveiled/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/how-2-escape-lost-submarine/9nq49gv97jdm
