Perhaps the biggest unexpected success of the decade has been the escape room games, especially the Xbox series.
Who would have thought it would be so much fun to lock yourself in a room with lots of decorations and work with friends and family to solve difficult puzzles while a harsh clock is ticking?
Even better, since many escape room games bring the exhilarating thrill of trapped puzzle-solving to the tabletop, you don’t need to leave your house to enjoy it.
You might be dubious about how well board games based on escape rooms can replicate the immersive craziness of being locked in a room with lots of things to touch and hidden corners to explore.
But rest assured that they provide all the same excitement as the real thing through their intricate puzzles, code-breaking gimmicks, and interesting brainteasers.
You should lock yourself in the best escape room games for Xbox that we have chosen right away. While some attempt to faithfully reproduce the single-room experience using illustrative picture cards, others fully commit to puzzle-solving, and a select few concentrate on narrative and theme.
These suggestions will suit you whether you’ve successfully navigated puzzles in the past or are looking to try an escape room for the first time.
1. Exit: The Game
Each game locks you and your friends inside four walls in true escape room style while providing you with a puzzle book, a few hints, and a solution wheel to guide you through various puzzles.
Many puzzles, such as word problems, optical illusions, and physical brainteasers, require you to bend the game pieces to reveal a secret message.
Expect to be challenged because it’s not a simple game, but the issues rarely seem unfair or poorly designed.
Giving you several “riddle cards” at once allows players to form groups rather than stumbling over one puzzle together, and “help cards” will provide helpful hints if you get stuck.
However, you should prepare each exit: The Game box can only be used once. Make the most of each game because you’ll be ripping pages and ripping cards — either to solve a puzzle game or out of frustration that your brilliant deduction wasn’t so brilliant after all.
They give you a lot of information upfront, and part of the challenge is figuring out how to use the tools you have before you figure out the solution.
2. ChromaGun
ChromaGun is a video game that solves color-based puzzles and is accessible on Xbox One. Players shoot colored paintballs at the walls and the various floating Worker Droids in the game using a large ChromaGun.
Droids that have color will draw to the area of the wall that matches their color. Players must arrange the droids in the appropriate patterns to open the room.
You can also combine primary colors to create new colors and increase the game’s difficulty. Also, this is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
3. Escape Room: The Game
Like the largest toy manufacturers, Escape Room: The Game is aware that large lumps of battery-powered molded plastic, outfitted with flashing lights and rotating mechanisms, are the only thing that consistently unites children’s excitement and guilty elation among adults everywhere.
With its “Chrono Decoder,” a working lockbox with a digital countdown timer and key slots that you must physically unlock to finish the game, this escape room game fits that description.
It’s a gimmick, but a brilliantly realized one supported by deep puzzles. Also, you’ll have to flex your cranial muscles to decipher maps and match shapes. And resolve logic puzzles in time with the countdown clock’s beeps.
In addition to counting down in front of your eyes. The decoder will also make foreboding noises to keep you alert and punish you for careless unlocks.
The box is divided into four scenarios: nuclear countdown, prison break, virus, and Aztec temple. It is possible to approach the entire box as a progression of scenarios rather than a collection of repetitive rooms because it features all the typical themes found in escape rooms, distinct riddles, and difficulty categories.
4. Q.U.B.E
Q.U.B.E. is a puzzle-solving game that, as the name implies, has players interacting with various cubes and shapes within their room’s walls.
After a mysterious incident, the player awakens in an odd room. They are equipped with gloves that can interact with particular shapes tucked away inside the walls.
Furthermore, the game’s objective is for the player to solve the puzzle in each room to unlock it. Allowing them to move on until they reach the exit.
Each block performs a different action depending on the color, and the rooms get harder as you move along.
5. The Turing Test
In the first-person puzzle-solving game The Turing Test, players take control of Ava Turing, an International Space Agent who is working on the moon Europa of Jupiter.
Ava is a research team member, but when an issue with the power system arises, she must help her teammates by emerging from a state of cryogenic dormancy.
However, she must pass tests involving rerouting energy to operate machinery and doors to save it. As players advance through the story, more components and goals are added to the puzzles. The majority of the critics’ reviews of the game were favorable.
6. Unmechanical: Extended
Unmechanical is a 2.5D puzzle video game that is comparatively easy to understand and play. Play the extended version instead of the original, most likely. Players will attempt to solve a student project by putting puzzle pieces together.
There are many different puzzles available for players to solve, so you should have no trouble passing the time for several hours. Critics largely gave it favorable reviews.
Also, it is a less well-known game, but if you’ve already played everything else on this list, you should give it a shot because it might surprise you. This video game is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
7. Assemblance
The first-person psychological thriller game Asemblance is psychedelic, but it also has a lot of puzzles to solve. The twisted game is influenced by well-known programs like The X-Files and Black Mirror.
When your player awakens, they are confined inside a strange machine and must piece together memories to truly understand what has happened to them and the environment in which they are trapped.
You will have to determine which memories are real and which are a simulation. The only source of direction is the artificial intelligence (AI) voice that directs you.
8. Unlock
Unlock! is a series of escape room games more visually focused than some of the other lists of abstract puzzle games.
Unlock! Depicts the rooms you’ll explore and the various objects of interest scattered throughout the scene using a deck of cards and companion app.
You must search every room for hidden clues and use the items you find to piece together puzzles to complete them.
Playing cards take center stage. To solve puzzles and reveal more cards, combine your pick-ups. To decipher codes, enter numbers into the companion app.
Furthermore, the game’s physicality does an excellent job of simulating the experience of watching an escape room and searching through its many secrets, from squinting at cards to revealing their secrets to tapping into your phone.
9. Limbo
Limbo, one of a pair of 2D puzzle platformers from the studio Playdead, has a tense, enigmatic atmosphere. The independent game has won about all the accolades and positive reviews that an independent game can.
But you’ve got to see it for yourself. The world will draw you in and leave you gasping for air. Even without the gameplay, the graphics alone are impressive. You must work your way through and around intriguing puzzles that are in your way.
10. Inside
Inside demonstrated that Playdead’s initial attempt at the 2D platformer puzzle was not an anomaly. Their follow-up was just as enthusiastically received as the first game, if not more so, demonstrating their complete mastery of the genre. The tale’s protagonist is a young boy caught up in a terrifying world who has to flee.
But once you become invested in the life of this unfortunate boy, the story will draw you in, and only then will it throw you back out. Inside is a movie that does a lot of things well. It merits your time and focus. This video game is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
11. Deckspace
Deckscape is the most straightforward escape room game available. It serves up a string of puzzles throughout a linear adventure using just one deck of cards.
There is no filler in this. Pick the top card from the pre-assembled deck, read the problem, and use the details to determine the answer.
Once you think you’re right, check the card’s reverse to see if you were. If not, you will lose points and must move on to the following puzzle.
Deckscape does not attempt to simulate the feeling of being locked in a room, searching for clues, and searching for answers.
Also, it falls somewhere in the middle of an escape room and a brainteaser, with just enough storytelling to keep you interested between puzzles. This is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
12. Escape Tales
The Escape Tales series, which has an entirely different flavor from other escape room games and is proud of its novel emphasis on storytelling, combines narrative focus, player choice, and traditional puzzling.
You’ll navigate a branching storyline to solve a sinister, supernatural mystery while picking your path and creating your adventure. The games in the series resemble a hybrid of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and standard escape room board games.
As a result, Escape Tales does away with many of the clichés. Your adventure has no time restrictions, and you are encouraged to play in various locations. There aren’t many MacGuffins to collect, and there aren’t any special code breakers for solving puzzles.
However, if you’re used to word association or physical puzzles, be prepared to get your brain cells working because most puzzles are algebraic problems and logical deductions.
13. Escape Room In A Box
Escape Room in a Box is a game that doesn’t hold back when it comes to props and tries to capture the excitement of solving physical puzzles.
You’ll find tiny plastic lockets inside that use real padlocks to keep them closed rather than metaphorical locks that open when you draw solution cards or type numbers into a phone app.
Also, it helps to ensure authenticity because there is no way to cheat or give up; to find out what’s inside the box, you have to play.
The novelty of the game is not where it rests. The puzzles are balanced and diverse, appealing to new players eager to assist and seasoned brainteasers up for a challenge. This is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
14. Puzzling Pursuit
The Puzzling Pursuits box sets are an approachable cross between an escape room game and a mail-order actual crime detective game.
You are given two large folders full of printed materials, including letters, maps, photos, newspaper clippings, and more. Each folder contains five different puzzles and a “meta-puzzle” that connects them all.
Similar to many other Exit: The Game games, there is a good deal of variety in the puzzles, including word and image associations, ciphers, hidden shapes and symbols, and even a tiny amount of outside-the-game research. Though few are evil, they are all well-crafted and entertaining.
Puzzling Pursuits’ materials feel quite impressive and immersive compared to most retail Escape Room boxed games; newspaper cuttings, for instance, are printed convincingly on thin, newsprint-like paper.
Additionally, the themes of the games (while hardly subtle) effectively develop a narrative atmosphere for your puzzle-solving. These are worth a try if you typically prefer letters, wordplay, and detective work to logic and code-wheels.
15. Portal
Portal, one of the best escape room games for xbox ever made and one of the most influential video games of any genre, comes from Valve (the people behind Steam).
We first encountered GLaDOS here. We discovered that the cake is a lie at this point. You must play Portal just for the slang references to popular culture.
But that doesn’t lessen how compelling the gameplay is. Who wouldn’t want to construct portals that one could leap through? However, it’s satisfying to figure out how to solve a puzzle in Portal.
Just be sure to look after your companion cube. This puzzle video game is one of the best escape room games for Xbox.
