Grab Your Get Out Of Jail Card — The Alcatraz Escape Book Review

An escape room crossed with a puzzle book — is this prison-themed title a breakout success?

Escape rooms have all sorts of spin-offs. As well as the traditional physical location where you, and a team of friends, attempt to escape a literal room within a set time limit, you can also find virtual escape rooms or ones in an envelope to do at home. You could even buy an escape room advent calendar.

Reading, on the other hand, is generally a solitary activity, something you can fill a rainy afternoon with. An ‘escape book’ presents an intriguing crossover. The Alcatraz Escape Book is more than just a story with some puzzles scattered through it. The cover has a ‘code wheel’ you can turn to match up symbols, letters, colours and numbers and instead of reading from cover to cover, you’re instructed to hop about from page 1 to page 14 to page 71 and so on.

For readers used to solving the same puzzles in much the same way in every issue of a beloved puzzle magazine, it can be really fun to sit down with a totally unfamiliar puzzle and work out, not only the answer but the way to approach it to reach the answer. While decoding a cyphered message may feel similar to existing teasers, other puzzles need a completely new style of solving, which feels like a real brain workout!

Challenge accepted

The Alcatraz Escape Room presented two different kinds of challenge. Some pages, such as the full-page illustrations, are so oblique you may struggle to distinguish between elements included in the puzzle and mere decoration. There are hints in the back of the book, but even so, sometimes several more leaps of logic are required before it becomes clear what, exactly, you’re supposed to be doing. Other pages have more obvious puzzles but pose the challenge of being fiendishly difficult. Even expert sudoku solvers may find themselves bent over puzzle 99 for an entire afternoon.

How much any given person enjoys a piece of puzzle-based entertainment relies so strongly on it being pitched at the right level of difficulty. For some, The Alcatraz Escape Book is definitely going to be too hard, even with the hints, but others at Puzzles HQ were able to master the most formidable of puzzles. There’s just one exception: puzzle 68, which has an error making it impossible to solve no matter how hard you try. As fellow publishers of puzzles, we’re well placed to know both that these mistakes do happen and that they’re very frustrating if they come up without a warning, so check out the publisher’s errata page for advance notice.

If you get completely stuck, the very back of the book has all the answers. These are always enough to get you to your next page of the story, though they sometimes only give you a piece of the puzzle rather than the answer in its entirety.

Mercy plea?

Disregarding the puzzles for a moment, the story can be muddled. Few characters are given enough time to be memorable, especially as readers are probably concentrating more on clues than character names. Particularly towards the end, there were sections which seemed out of sync with what came before or after. It’s not enough to spoil the experience, but for readers already frustrated that the escape book is too difficult, it might be the last straw.

While you’re warned at the start of the book that you’ll need to ‘pay attention to everything’, there’s very little guidance about which small details are going to come back and be important. Throughout most of the book, everything you need to solve a given puzzle is either on the page in front of you or, at most, one or two puzzles back. At the end, however, the reader is suddenly asked to remember certain details with no indication as to how long ago these were or the best way to check back to find them.

Physical escape rooms often set a time limit of an hour; The Alcatraz Escape Book will definitely last you longer than that. If you’re doing it on your own, set aside a whole day, or several separate afternoons. The nature of its book format makes it difficult to imagine solving as a team and, even if you tried, the puzzles are linear. You can’t move on to a new one until you’ve solved the one you’re working on.

I’ll admit that, for me, The Alcatraz Escape Book was too difficult. I had to look at the hints for most of the puzzles and needed the answers in the back for over half. If you, or someone you know, really relishes a puzzling challenge, though, this could well be the book for them!