The Escape Game: The Heist – Vol. 1: Chasing Hahn (Play at Home)

Everything you’d expect in International Reconnaissance 

Work as a secret agent to thwart the infamous art curator and suspected art thief, Vincent Hahn. You’ll need to uncover his true identity, connect him to a crime, and work with the International Police to finally exact justice. With the help of your Intelligence Agent, you’ll need to stop Hahn before another masterpiece goes missing.

If your company name is ‘The Escape Game’ then you’ve got to be pretty confident in the games you are producing. We had come across The Escape Game (TEG) before when we played their live avatar version of ‘The Ruins’, and that game was beautiful so when we realised they had digital games, we thought it would be stupid not to give them a try.

We were also told that ‘Chasing Hahn’, is a continuation of The Heist story. Fortunately, you don’t need to play The Heist escape game first, which was good, as we hadn’t. When we signed up for this game it was $10 for Volume One, and $10 for Volume Two, or $17 for both; naturally, we went for both.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

This game takes place in an online portal that would appear to imitate a work console at ‘The Agency for International Reconnaissance’. Most of your interactions will take place within this portal, but you do also need to download a zip file containing some useful files before you get started.

The interface was really rather slick and everything was clearly labelled, making it very user-friendly. If at any point you needed to come out of the game environment it used good signposting to let you know. There is one point where you may be required to phone a number in the US; if you can’t do this, then use the hints system for a workaround (don’t worry, we won’t count that as a hint).

The game wasn’t just purely you interacting with the terminal, there was much more than that and TEG used video well to help build the story and make you feel like you were more involved in what was going on. These videos were well made and provided a solid conclusion to the game.

We played this game as a team of two from separate devices (one using Chrome and the other Safari) and everything worked smoothly. If one of us solved something then it would pop up on the screen of the other, if it didn’t we just hit refresh and it would appear. This was good as it meant we could work independently of each other to solve puzzles. You are also able to leave the game at any point and when you log back in you will continue where you left off.

PUZZLES

As you may expect in a game where you are trying to track down someone, there was a fair amount of real-world problem solving that fitted into the theme. Not really searching as search, but you needed to be able to sift through documents and identify the information you need while discarding the ‘fluff’.

Often when we play games with this scenario we find ourselves being bombarded with pages of text to read through; fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Chasing Hahn and the information made for easy reading.

The puzzles were of varying levels of difficulty, some were pretty simple and were solved in seconds, yet there were more complex multi-step puzzles that required a lot more time and effort to solve.

CLUE SYSTEM

Vol 1: Chasing Hahn has possibly one of the most detailed clue systems that we have seen so far. If you do need a hint there is a button that is always on screen, and you can access it at any time. When you click on it you’re presented with a new page within the terminal that is broken down in such a way that you can scroll to find the section you need and then click ‘view/get hint’.

When you find the section you need help on you are given three hints which give you a cryptic nudge back in the right direction. If this still doesn’t help you, you can scroll to the bottom and find the solution. This is a great method as it means you get as much, or as little help as you want, and you can still play through the game if you get stuck.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Chasing Hahn was put together very well (as we expected from TEG), with solid puzzles, a clean interface, and a great hint system, this is a great collaborative game to play with friends.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Desktop or laptop computer (does not support mobile devices)
• Stable internet connection
• Notepad for taking notes

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 46 minutes

Website: https://theescapegame.com