I recently blindly purchased a puzzle game called Cantaloop (Chapter 1: Breaking into Prison). I’ve played a dozen different styles of escape room home games at this point, but even at this point, Cantaloop was quite different than any of the others both in aesthetic and puzzle design. Fans of old point & click computer games will love all the unique elements Cantaloop brings to the table. It’s essentially Monkey Island committed to paper.
For those not familiar with Monkey Island, “Monkey Island” is a pirate-themed puzzle computer game where just about everything you do or interact with is a little bit funny. There are other similar games like Maniac Mansion or Shadowgate, but Cantaloop clearly follows Monkey Island’s approach in focusing on characters and narrative, rather than just an interesting sandbox to solve puzzles in. As a result, Cantaloop invests about half of the book’s real estate to dialog. And about half of that is dad jokes.
The game’s mechanism’s work well together. You can combine items with items or items with elements on the game’s various locations to get identifiers for events to read. The game anticipates most of what the player might want to do and even has secret “achievements” for creative actions the player takes, good or bad. It’s really satisfying when an idea clicks and you find a juicy event to read or a new milestone to mark off.
My favorite part of the game is how nonlinear it is. That truly separates it from most at-home escape room experiences. With so many different directions to go, I would recommend taking a break rather than going to the hints. One of my favorite moments was when I came up with a solution to a problem while away from home. I couldn’t wait to get home to try my idea, and sure enough, it worked!
The humor and variety make the game a good choice for group play. Players can take turns reading, and once you get through the initial exploration of a new area, it’s easy to bounce around to try different things and give every player a chance to test ideas. It only takes a few seconds to try out an idea, even if it involves moving locations, so it’s simple and easy to play. It’s really interesting how converting the medium to paper makes the game more accessible as a group experience than its PC-based predecessors.
The difficulty level was generally good, with two standout puzzles I loved (both involving cases where you might not realize you already have everything you need). There was only one whammy puzzle for me where I didn’t love the solution, and a few where I felt like I got lucky (trying something I didn’t think would work, and it did), but overall the puzzles (and non-puzzles!) are fun, creative, and funny.
I’ll definitely be grabbing Cantaloop volume 2 at some point to continue the adventure. This might also send me down a rabbit hole of replaying my old favorites from the DOS era and seeing if they live up to my memory of them. (Hugo’s House of Horrors, here I come!)
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