School’s Out (spoiler free review)

• Link: www.trappedintheweb.com
• Players: 1+
• Time: 1-2 hours

From their website: “Can you crack our virtual escape rooms? Our virtual escape rooms provide endless amounts of entertainment and fun. While initially designed to help people connect during lockdowns (and offer an alternative to Zoom quizzes!!), these themed online escape rooms have remained popular among customers as restrictions ease, enabling people to have a laugh and test their critical thinking, while remaining safe in the comfort of their own homes.

Take your pick…

There are various themed rooms to try out, from Cabin Fever to School’s Out – all of which have varying difficulty levels. If you’re a novice or have children on your team, perhaps try one of the easier rooms to get warmed up. Then, once you’ve gotten into the swing of things, you can come back and try your hand at one of the more advanced escape rooms Trapped in the Web has on offer.”

We were approached by the folks behind trappedintheweb.com to take a look at their online escape rooms – and since we’re a fan of all types of puzzle games, we were thrilled to give them a look. This particular virtual escape room places you in a school, with all of the information coming in text snippets and associated graphics/illustrations.

You can do this by yourself or with friends anywhere in the world.  If you want to add in friends, you can either screen share over Zoom/Teams or each of you can buy the room and then be able to explore on your own.   There is no built-in chat, so you’ll have to use a phone or an online conference room to communicate.  If you are on separate logins, you’ll have to remember that they aren’t linked together, so you’ll have to each put in the answers on each respective computer to continue to progress together. We played this game with four players, in two groups of two.  Each team had their own log-in, and we communicated over a video Zoom.  

School’s Out is listed in the Easy tier of the escape rooms on the site (the lowest of four levels), and we were able to both log in and see the first room:

The path of the story is variable.  At times, it is linear with a single active puzzle; but other places offer a bit more exploration with multiple options available to explore.  Having two log-ins for the game made it nice for the different groups to explore at their own pace and in their own direction.  The entire escape room is managed in the browser window, and you navigate through the entire puzzle via the buttons at the bottom of each page.

Some of the more important visual clues ended up with permanent buttons at the bottom of each room.  Other graphics either required us to take notes, or we discovered a nice shortcut of opening each of the clues in a new browser tab so that we could refer to them (and zoom in on them) as needed.  By the end of the night, I had ten tabs open… if that’s any indication to the amount of “stuff” that you’ll need to look at in order to solve the puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are of a nice varying curve of difficulty.  A few puzzles were extremely straightfoward while others required us to piece together information from multiple different locations before we could solve them.  For the most part, the puzzles were fair, and a number were fairly difficult (especially for an escape room rated to be amongst the easiest on the site!).  That being said, I felt that all of the information was available within the escape room.

For each puzzle, there is a box in which to type in your answer.  Many of the answers are typical 4 digit combinations, while others are a bit more freehand.  That being said, there were times when the instructions were explicit on the type of answer being looked for while others were frustratingly silent.  There was one puzzle in particular where we thought we had the right answer, but we were stymied for a few minutes as we realized that we had the right idea but the incorrect format, and there wasn’t really any clue/hint from the system on the needed format for that particular puzzle.  One other puzzle felt a little “read my mind-y” but the bulk of them were nice well constructed puzzles.

As you go through the escape room, there are both voluntary hints and involuntary hints.  What does that mean?  Well, at the bottom of each puzzle page, there is a big blue button that you can hit if you want to request for a hint.  As with many escape rooms, there are multiple levels of help, so you can get the first level hint, see if it’s enough to spur you on, and if not, hit the button again to get the next level hint, etc.  

But what about the involuntary hints?  Interestingly, if you type in an incorrect answer into a box, the system tells you that you’re incorrect and then gives you some hints as to what you might need to consider in order to get to the right answer.  Oftentimes, this hint didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but other times we ended up maybe getting some free information from the system – which we may not have necessarily wanted at that time.

As I said earlier, the entire thing is run through a browser window, and I’d definitely caution you to use the navigation buttons at the bottom of each page.  If you use the “Back” function of the browser, you could lose some of your progress and have to re-solve the puzzles.  If you stay within the built-in navigation, the game remembers all of your answers so that you can explore freely.

In this game, I’d say there were around ten different “locations”, and you have to virtually walk through the rooms and corridors of the school to get to different locations.  It does mean a bit of clicking here and there, but you’ll memorize the layout of the school soon enough, so it’s not too bad.  (And, if you save a bunch of stuff in different tabs, you’ll only have to trek back through the maze of the school when you’re ready to solve a puzzle…)

So, we solved this in 82 minutes (even though our picture below says 2hr 22) – I logged in an hour early because I screwed up the time zone conversion…. So I logged in an hour early and forgot to reset the clock when we actually started.   We did not need any voluntary hints, but we did end up getting 3 involuntary hints, 2 of which gave us information we did not necessarily know. 

For 9 GBP (about $12.50 today), one to two hours of entertainment for four players is a fairly good value. Sure, it’s not quite the same as a physical escape room, but this turned out to be a really nice way to hang out with friends from the other side of the country.  We chatted about life in general while we puzzled away.  In the end, a successful night for four friends.

There are 9 escape rooms total on the site, www.trappedintheweb.com, and you can buy them individually, in sets of 3 or all in one go.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor