Locked In Folkestone: Sub-Agents (Play at Home)

Logic heavy, but a solid game

A mysterious MI5 agent has approached you to take on a mission that is a case of national security, to save millions of civilians’ lives. However, the details are a little vague but that is exactly why you have been called upon for your expert skills. So assemble your team, as you become MI5 substitute agents or you could call yourself sub-agents, as you take on this important mission, are you ready?

Like many escape room companies during the pandemic, Locked In Folkestone have decided to create an online escape room to keep them ticking over. Their first game, ‘Sub-Agents’, is a purely online game that can be played anytime you want from the comfort of your own home. It’s worth noting though that you have 48 hours to play the game from when you first log in, so make sure you don’t log in until you are pretty much ready to play.

Despite having been to Folkestone before, we haven’t actually played any of the real-life games by Locked In Folkestone yet. Because of this, we really didn’t know what sort of experience or puzzles to expect, a leap into the unknown! We found a quiet Sunday, opened up our laptops and were once again ready to save the world.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

Sub-Agents is a self-contained online game that is played through your browser, with no live host or input needed from Locked In themselves. The game is set up like an investigation, so you have files to go through and then some more practical missions once you know the location that is being targeted.

The interface was pretty basic, which isn’t a bad thing, just don’t expect all the bells and whistles that you may see in custom interfaces. Saying that, we had no issues with the interface which made for a smoother experience, sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple. At times we found it frustrating that we couldn’t physically interact with items/puzzles, but later on in the game that changed and the puzzles that really would benefit from physical manipulation had it.

At times you may find yourself needing to go back and forth between the puzzle you’re on, and earlier ones that you have solved. We found taking screenshots as we went along seemed to work well and saved us time going over what we had already solved. There is also one puzzle that we had to use Google for, I don’t think we missed anything in the game, so we believe that you’re supposed to go to Google for this one.

PUZZLES

We encountered a good variety of puzzles in Sub-Agents, probably more than we were expecting. Logic, spatial relations, more logic, some maths, word-play and decoding were the main puzzle types, so a good range that should find a strength in most team-members.

Out of all the puzzles, only one really stood out to us as being a bit different to what we had seen before, as most of the other puzzles were the usual escape room types. That said, Locked In Folkestone have put their own spin on a number of them so even if you’ve seen them before it may take you a few minutes to work out what you’re supposed to be doing.

Not only were the puzzles varied in their types, but they also varied in difficulty. Some puzzles were very quick to solve yet others (mostly the logic ones) took us much longer. We took just under an hour with this game and I think of that, probably 40% of our time was spent on one logic puzzle that just seemed to baffle us. I’m personally not a fan of lengthy logic puzzles so my brain shuts down, but I’d imagine other teams would get it pretty quickly.

Just thinking about it again, there were actually two points in this game when one of us said “I like that”, technically both were puzzles, but for one of those moments it was simply the solution that we liked as it obviously changes according to when the game is played (that’s all I’ll say on that one).

CLUE SYSTEM

Unfortunately, once again, we can’t really comment on the clue system as we didn’t use any clues. At the end of the game it tells you how long you took and how many clues you have used, so we didn’t want to dirty our score with a clue 🙂 Although prior to starting the game, we were told that Cluerisa was always on hand to help us should we get stuck. If Cluerisa couldn’t help us, then we could either email or Facebook Message Locked In Folkestone and they get us back on track.

So although we can’t comment on the clue system, there was one, we didn’t need it, but I’d imagine it is probably decent.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Nothing to make this game stand out in the online escape room world, but we were actually surprised by this game. The ending felt a bit abrupt and most of our time was spent on one puzzle. If you’re a logic-fiend then you’ll likely get through in no time, but it’s not a bad way to spend an evening with friends (virtually).

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Computer and Browser
• Paper and pen for taking notes

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 53 mins

Website: http://www.locked-in.co.uk

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience, but this has not influenced our review.