The Forest Adventure Escape was also harder than I thought it would be.
Last week we wrote about three escape room-styled games by Escapade, the Kiwi escape-game experts, which you can play from the comfort of your home. But to give us the chance to test our wits against their at-home puzzles, riddles and mini-games, they offered us the chance to play Forest Adventure Escape Game App.
With not much else to do on the weekend, I gave it a crack with my partner and had a pretty fun time despite my initial doubts. We didn’t do as well as we thought we would do either because many of the puzzles are a little trickier than they first look. Most importantly though, we had some laughs and found ourselves talking about the game a few times later in the day.
The Game
You and your group are on a Forest Adventure Escape where you will need to come together to retrieve the treasure map from across the raging river. But before the storm comes in and you get to that part of the story, there’s a handful of puzzles to help get your problem-solving juices flowing.
The first puzzle is quite simple and at the time I thought that if the rest of them were like this then it’s going to be a quick game. But I managed to be too eager with my solution and answered incorrectly because of one silly mistake. Not off to a great start but it did make me laugh at myself which is totally fine by me.
I thought the next few puzzles were also fairly easy but then my partner came up with a different solution to a few of them and you know that both of you can’t be right. So, you try again or do as I did and punch in the solution because you’re the one holding the phone. Either you get it right or the buzzer goes off and you have to admit you were wrong. Or, you work together as a team to finally get the right answer. And so on and so on until you reach the end and find the treasure.
The mix and variety of puzzles really make the Forest Adventure Escape App a really good online game to play. There was a maze we had to find our way through, a checkers-styled game that wasn’t difficult but much harder than first thought and a number of riddles and word games that’ll trip you up if you’re not careful. We also had to jump onto Google Maps to search for a sign, spot the differences in a picture (we slapped ourselves after reading clue two), as well as, needing to roll an empty toilet roll back and forth to measure distance.
It was a good hour and a half spent working and playing together. Looking back, we think we would’ve done better if we hadn’t rushed through some of the puzzles but everything is easier in hindsight. Overall though, we enjoyed our time playing together, which is what matters most and not our dismal result near the bottom of the scoreboard. 
How It Works
The Forest Adventure Game App is hosted on Actionbound, an app for playing digitally interactive scavenger hunts, which you need to download. With that, a physical copy of the Survival Guide (three pages you will need to print) and a few other household items—scissors, an empty toilet roll, pen, things that can be used as markers—you will enter the unique game code, which you get after purchasing the experience.
The Forest Adventure Escape Game App is not suited to escape room fanatics (its skill rating is easy/medium) but if you’ve only ever played a handful of these games before, like myself, then it’s definitely worth a shot. And if you’ve got kids, by all means give it a go—you won’t be disappointed.
Follow the link below and see how well you can do.