Review: Beach Escape Game

RATING: 3 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 14:55

We sail the high seas in our rented office space, seeking a lost treasure we’ll use to buy a better ship!

Story

Captain Eli Godsey has set sail on a quest for lost treasure, but things do not always go according to plan. It is your team’s job to search the ship wreckage and discover the treasure once and for all, but you are not alone. Another team of pirates will arrive in 60 minutes and you will be forced to walk the plank. Arrrrrr you going to be able to crack the code and escape?

Lost Treasure crafts a fairly predictable pirate tale of finding the treasure or walking the plank. It alone is not really the reason to book your ticket, but what it lacks in narrative, it makes up for across its other areas, more than redeeming itself.

Scenic

This ship is a modest one – make no mistake – but still manages to evoke the spirit of a plundering band of pirates. From a scenic perspective it suffers in the same way many other pirate games before it have with the curse of the square box office space – a conflict to how most would naturally envision a real ship might be laid out.

The truth is we really had no idea this scene was intended to be set on a shipwreck, as the space depicts Captain Godsey’s vessel in fairly pristine condition with no real noticeable signs of damage. And while this doesn’t necessarily take away from the experience of playing the game (it’s still a pirate ship) it does put a bit of a damper on the credibility of its narrative.

Puzzles

Lost Treasure crafts a fairly low-tech gaming experience high on padlocks and keys, but to us that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We appreciate a game on its own merits and do not think every single one of them need be a high tech extravaganza.

At its core, Lost Treasure remains a fun game, and its steps steer a course toward logical and intuitive game play. Although there’s not really a big “wow” or “ah ha!” puzzle moment to be had, we most certainly did enjoy our time among Godsey’s crew.

Overall

We’ll start by copy/pasting this bit from past Beach Escape Game reviews to address the 800 pound gorilla in the room. We spoke with Beach Escape Game on our most recent visit requesting to arrange getting a few press photos to include in our reviews of their games. They assured us that would be no problem, and we offered to reach out via email once we were ready to post. I was very disappointed to share that this venue, who we have a lot of good things to say about, would become the first to ever adamantly refuse to participate in our site, even after enthusiastically assuring they wanted to while we were face to face. As a site, our mission is to review every single game that we play, so we’re not ever going to leave one out – even if it means our first (and hopefully only) review to ever go online without photographs. It is our hope that Beach Escape Game reconsiders this position so that we can edit this post in the future to include photos that literally every other venue in the US has been more than happy to provide.

That being said, we really do remain fans of Beach Escape Game as a product. Lost Treasure, for us was the middle grade offering of their roster, sitting between a great 4 Key game in The Honky Tonk and an ok 2 Key outing in Where in the World? – but this pirate adventure still provides a good time. We hope that Beach Escape Game continues to grow and improve their product offering, as we feel they really do a lot right and are worth supporting.