Review: Rabbit Hole Escape Games - Space Mining Adventure

RATING: 2 Keys RESULT: Loss REMAINING: X:XX

Lost in space takes a whole new meaning after how confused this game left us.

Story

In the year 2088, your team is mining on another planet for resources as Earth’s fossil fuels have depleted considerably. However, other life forms have been watching your activities and abduct your team. You will soon be forced to mine for these aliens unless you can escape their research spacelab first. Your mission: unravel their secret fuel plans and find a way back to your space station.

Space Mining Adventure crafts a scenario that is fairly easy to become immersed in. It’s a unique story that makes casts us into an active leading role.

We continue to appreciate Rabbit Hole Escape Games for their willingness to embrace more unique themes. Unfortunately, story is where our praise for them consistently begins… and ends.

Scenic

Space Mining Adventure’s scenic quality is on a level significantly higher than that found in Escape the Bermuda Triangle. The game’s environment exists within the realm of an alien space station spanning several different rooms. It feels large and sprawling, and is easy to imagine it may exist on an even grander scale in the story world than we’re physically able to see here.

Custom built access doors slide Star Trek style evoking a futuristic flavor that helps transport us deeper into this story.

While many “outer space” styled gamed we’ve encountered come across feeling like square office rooms labeled as space ships, Rabbit Hole Escape Games does a decent job of establishing a much more authentic environment.

Puzzles

We’ve now played two of Rabbit Hole Escape Games’ rooms, and we noticed unpleasant consistencies between them. While they’re certainly not all bad, and each have some clever puzzles that we instantly came to appreciate and enjoy, the seem far better known for logic leaps of some of the largest variety we’ve seen.

We’re talking the worst of examples in that arena – wherein you ask for a hint, and then need to have the hint explained to you because the process still doesn’t make any sense.

Rocky roads like that through a gameplay experience make the overall product impossible to enjoy, and create a scenario where a room feels far more like an endurance test to see how far you can be pushed than a game you’re playing for fun.

Overall

While I try to be a firm believer of “never say never” – this far Rabbit Hole Escape Games has definitely proven to not be our cup of tea. The games are disjointing mish-mashes of brief moments of fun and long stretches of tedium.

The feeling we get from playing each of the Rabbit Hole Escape Game rooms is that almost as if they were designed by folks unfamiliar with how an escape game actually flows. Or perhaps more accurately, they were designed by folks bent on “feeling smarter” than everyone else by creating convoluted puzzles that cannot be solved with rational minded logic – the kind of steps that only make sense if you create them.

The Tampa Bay area has some great venues that are not only regional standouts, but among our favorites in the United States. There’s lots of reason to venture west on I-4, but this is unquestionably one Rabbit Hole you probably will want to avoid.