Push out the review draft I sat on for ages

Author: jericson

_posts/2025-06-18-polar_station.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: '_Exit: The Game—The Polar Station_'
+subtitle: 'Maybe too much of a good thing'
+tags: game review
+---
+
+The _Exit_ series are escape-rooms-in-a-box featuring riddles that
+must be completed under time pressure. Nothing prevents solo play,
+but, like an escape room, they are designed for a small group of
+friends who bring different ways of thinking. It's also a
+single-play-only game since players will literally spoil the puzzles.
+
+![After escaping Research Station IMB-Q-13, I tried to pack it up
+again.](/images/polar_station.jpg)
+ 
+ 
+Reviewing such a game comes with unique challenges. Generally games
+need more than a single session to evaluate. Not only do some games
+unfold their secrets only after several plays, you gotta beware of
+letting an especially pleasant or disagreeable experience bias your
+conclusion. Puzzle games come with the added complication of the
+Goldilocks paradox of difficulty. Solutions that come too easily don't
+satisfy and neither do puzzles that resist too much. Ideally your
+brain will be taxed _just enough_ to be interesting without needing to
+read the help cards. Unfortunately every group will have a different
+level of _just right_ and I can't know where your level might be.
+
+_The Polar Station_ puts your team on a research station near the
+North Pole when something terrible happens. Fortunately help is
+coming. Unfortunately, you'll need to open a series of containers in
+order to find the code that will open the door to exit. My daughter
+enjoyed the story at the start, but the focus shifts to puzzles pretty
+quickly. Each fits well into the overall theme, but there's no time to
+read lore until the very end. 
+
+I played with my children: 10-year-old twins and my college-age
+son. We read the rules together and while the mechanism for opening
+each lock was quite involved, none of us had difficulty understanding
+it. Each lock opens when you enter the right combination of three
+digits into a '90's-style DRM code wheel, consult the card that
+matches the revealed number and cross-reference the object you are
+attempting to unlock to index a second card. Unlocking containers
+opens up more clue cards and sometimes a new component. It's easier to
+manage than it sounds.
+
+Without spoiling any of the riddles, you can immediately disassemble
+the booklet that's included in the starting inventory. The game
+suggests a max of 4 players with the primary limitation being access
+to clues. Since the game starts with just the code wheel and the
+booklet, the first riddle involves clue congestion as everyone tries
+to examine the booklet at the same time. Even after getting more
+clues, the booklet remains the critical piece of most puzzles. You're
+going to cut out pages by the end of the game, so why not spread out
+the material from the start?
+
+Having the freedom to destroy components means the designers could
+stretch puzzles in unusual directions. It also means you can
+accidentally destroy a clue in the process of attempting to solve
+it. We ended up needing a solution for one riddle for that
+reason. (With a bit of tape I was able to see how the puzzle works
+after we'd finished our escape.) If we'd avoided our mistake, I
+suspect this riddle would have been a highlight. A little more
+instructional text might have prevented our mistake without harming
+the crux of the riddle.
+
+After an hour, the younger half of our group wandered off. Around that
+point, the riddles tipped over into the frustrating category for
+us. Good puzzle game design gives players several puzzles to work on
+so that you can make progress on other problems while stuck an a
+particularly tricky problem. Some riddles need to marinate in the back
+of your mind for awhile. _The Polar Station_ is surprisingly linear,
+however. I believe we maxed out at three simultaneously-open riddles
+and needed to check the solution of all three.
+
+Taking help cards counts against the final score _only if they provide
+new information_. The first help card tells players which clues and
+components are used, but we didn't normally need that help. We
+sometimes _were_ helped by the second help card, but not enough to
+actually solve the riddles. As we neared the 2 hour mark, [ego
+depletion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion) kicked in,
+which meant we were in a particularly poor mental state to solve the
+riddles. Meanwhile, we'd also reached the hardest riddles in the game.
+
+Thankfully the final few riddles were easier to solve and we escaped
+our polar prison. Whenever you finish, the story ends the same
+way. For people familiar with a particular cultural artifact, the
+narrative is wholly predictable, which is fine given the inventive
+riddles at the heart of the game. Since the game ended on riddles in
+our Goldilocks zone, we had a satisfying escape.
+
+I only noticed after we finished that there is a helper app for this
+title that provides a tutorial and a timer with ambient sounds.  The
+rule book said the app also includes three bonus riddles, but I don't
+know where they might be. 
+
+Taken as a whole, _The Polar Station_ comes together as a
+professionally developed experience for a bargain price. This is
+perhaps more difficult than the 3/5 level printed on the box
+implies. Again, this is group dependent and I haven't tried any other
+entry in the series. 
+