If you’ve kept up with any of the articles I’ve written you know I get a lot of playable games through my XBox Game Pass subscription. Along with the Microsoft XBox Game Pass subscription for PC which runs me $13.99 a month a free subscription to Ubisoft’s download service is also included. Though this particular publisher doesn’t have hundreds and hundreds of titles in their software catalog they do have some good ones I’ve discovered. They have all the Diablo’s, including the current one available as downloads. Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, For Honor, most of the Assassin’s Creed franchise games, and much much more. It’s a more than welcome addition and valuable freebie included with all XBox Game Pass subscriptions.
This month I found a nice little “escape room” game on UBISoft. The name of that game is Transference. Escape Room games differ from my usual fare of first person survival and psychological horror themed favorites. Escape Room games are just that. An environment is created for your character to “look” around or “discover”. I guess “investigate” might be a better word to use as the whole point of these games is to try and figure or find the way out. These tend be more cerebrally challenging than even your most challenging survival horror as the whole game centers around solving manual, virtual, building, and hide and seek type of puzzle challenges and the primary way you move from level to level.
The first time I loaded up Transference I set my left hand on my keyboard and my right hand on my mouse and started “walking” around in a small 3D environment which was rendered on screen right before my eyes. Prior to this virtual landscape appearing, there was a scene of a man being recorded in front of a video camera informing us he had discovered a way to map the human conscious to virtual worlds. He gave a melancholy goodbye as he mentions him and his family will soon be entering that virtual world and he can’t wait to show (us?) all the things that can be done. It seems a little ominous but after that short somewhat awkward video playback the virtual landscape mentioned previously renders.
It looks like a the piece of a city block from some suburban or older business area. Some businesses can be seen with the sidewalks stretching off in either direction, or to the next block anyways I suppose, and we are thrown into the game. Now it’s up to us to figure out what to do next. I wander over to the sidewalk and try the doors to some of the businesses. Locked. I start to wander down the sidewalk and I come upon a backpack on the ground with a sheaf of papers spilling out of it which has “LOST DOG” written on them. There is also a key there and it is welcomingly blinking. I grab the key and wander back to the businesses to see if the key might open one of them. Sure enough it does. And I suppose I have solved the first escape room challenge.
Next I’m in the foyer of that business I just found the key to and there is a row of mailboxes labeled ABCDEF with light up push buttons below them on one wall and a distorted “missing” chunk of the environment in front of us. On the floor is a carpet with a musical staff and 3 notes printed on it. I have a musical background and happen to know that the notes on the rug are CD and E. So I press the buttons matching the mailboxes of CD & E. That missing chunk of the environment materializes in front of us as if a corrupted file has been fixed and that solves the second escape room challenge.
Now I’m in what looks to be an apartment with a few rooms and the way out leads to a stairwell with stairs going to upper and lower floors. This I presume is the presentation of the of the third escape room and so I start to make my way around as I figure out how to solve this “environmental” puzzle. There’s a light switch on the wall that when I press it seems to whisk me away to an alternate dimension. It seems to be the same as the apartment I was just in but the interior is furnished differently, the paint on the wall is different, and both have radio’s but seem to be tuned to different stations. After a few more minutes of investigation I conquer this third escape room puzzle and move on to the next challenge.
Transference is turning out to be a fun and challenging little game with great mechanics and an interesting story brewing. I can’t wait to get back into the game and figure out some more puzzles so that I might learn just that it is that is going on in Transference and ultimately escape the shackles that bind and find my way back to my family?
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