Escape Game: The Mad Hacker

Escape Game Adventure #1

Publisher’s Description

Your mission: Locate and destroy the virus and then escape from the scientific compound before the spatial-temporal portal closes forever! With the help of Dooz, your faithful robot, you have been teleported to the year 2394! In this era, a mad scientist plans to paralyze the entire world using a powerful cyber virus . . . In a few moments, it will be too late! Choose to solve this challenge on your own or with a friend! Either way, let’s go!

Details

• Title: Escape Game: The Mad Hacker
  • Authors: Remi Prieur, Melanie Vives
  • Illustrator:  El Gunto 
  • Publisher: Schiffer Publishing Ltd (February 28, 2020)
  • Series: Escape Game Adventure, #1
  • Reading level: 8 – 12 years
  • Illustrations: 48+
  • Pages: 48
  • ISBN13: 9780764358968
  • Binding: paperback

My Thoughts

Without having one of these books to look through, it might be hard to imagine exactly how this escape game works.

If you’re like me you immediately think of escaping from a place. There is usually a team of players who cooperatively work puzzles and try to discover clues and even mechanisms. As they solve things they progress to new places and eventually accomplish a specific goal. I think most of these games factor in time limits also.

How This Game Works

This escape story can be played alone, but I recommend sharing the fun with a friend. But regardless of alone or with friends, there will always be one very important player on your side.

Who Is Dooz?

Dooz, a robot, supplies objects in a toolbox that will be used to help solve some of the puzzles. You will find the toolbox in the back of the book. But in order to use the objects, you will have to cut them out. Yep. I know. I’m a person who doesn’t even like to break in a new book. But trust me. This is a workbook. One that will be well worth bending, cutting, and writing on the pages.

In Escape Game: The Mad Hacker, Dooz’s time-travel portal drops you off in front of the entrance to a scientific compound. There is a fingerprint reader that controls access. But you discover that it has retained the print of the last person to use it in its memory bank, which is great since Dooz has recorded the fingerprints of everyone who has worked there that day. One of the prints should match the one on the reader. Your job is to find the identical fingerprint.

On the next page are fingerprints that can be compared to the print that is currently on the reader. When the match is located you will proceed to the page number near the matching print to continue the adventure.

One of the many things I love about this book is that there are little informational file cards throughout the book. If you look closely, there is one above. They are all labeled Do You Know? The one on this page, near the fold, gives information about fingerprints.

Another thing I like is that the puzzles vary in how difficult they are. Some are not too hard, while others might require more of a group effort or a little more time to solve.

What Concerned Me

Nothing

What I Liked

What a fun way to work on logic and observation skills. And I love the Do You Know? informational cards that are scattered throughout the book. Some of the topics that are explained are

• fingerprints
• drones
• laser beam
• cyber viruses

About the Authors and Illustrator

Rémi Prieur is a business developer with a long career in social media. Mélanie Vives is a journalist and co-founder of an independent magazine. She has escaped more than 150 rooms and posts online reviews for France and other countries. Together, they launched escapegame.paris.

El Gunto is a French freelance illustrator, currently based in Barcelona, Spain. He has worked on comics and as a concept artist and character designer for the entertainment industry.