Waterfall Prisoner Reviews

Well, I gotta say Waterfall Prisoner was a very pleasant surprise! An escape room type puzzler filled with a LOT of puzzles to make it worth your while. Some of them are of a more classic mechanical type, while most (my favourites) are focused on gathering clues from the environment and from some notes you find along the way (which are in-universe, not just direct clues, very nicely integrated). Some of them also involve collecting and using different items, including some of the best designed and used keys I've seen in a long time. The difficulty curve is perfectly balanced, starting out pretty linear and gradually increasing the complexity until you get to the final areas, more open and with more and more puzzles available at the same time, with also plenty of crossovers between them. I got stuck in some of them, but most of the time just coming back after a good night's sleep was enough to see things in a different light, as it should be with good puzzle games. The plot is also worth mentioning, a small but charming mystery told mostly via the in-game documents, which are very carefully written since they intertwine plot points with puzzle clues. It's not obvious at all, and thus it's also very rewarding discovering every clue. It's like the plot is a puzzle in itself, very on-topic and refreshing! To top it all off, the developers released a free epilogue DLC with a new area full of totally new puzzles (including some new mechanics) which also provides a nice finishing touch to the base plot. That's the kind of commitment and passion I love to see from a dev team, I will make sure to keep an eye on any future projects.

Game is a little rough around the edges but has some good puzzles and a nice variety of puzzle types . It is definitely more on the difficult side for this genre. I would recommend this for people who enjoy hard puzzles and having to think things out. There are a few puzzles that I've needed to check the guide for and I'm still not sure where the clues or hints for the answer were meant to be. Because the game is fairly new , cheap , and offers a demo I can overlook the issues I had with it. Hopefully future patches will clear up some of the more obtuse puzzles.