Last week we looked at Prospero’s The Shining board game, which emphasized surviving and navigating the Overlook Hotel, though that spatial navigation was limited to a handful of significant rooms and locations, like the kitchen, the Colorado Lounge, Room 237, and the hedge maze. The Coded Chronicles game Escape from the Overlook Hotel is similarly grounded in exploring the Overlook, though the players’ occupation of and engagement with these spaces is much more intricate and involved, starting with the hotel’s kitchen and ending in its snowy hedge maze. 

There’s a balance of freedom of choice and narrative limitations for players in Escape From the Overlook Hotel. For example, in order to be successful, players have to interact with the minutiae of the environment in which they find themselves. Wendy has two abilities: to look and to use. As the game starts, she is in the hotel’s kitchen, immediately after locking Jack in the pantry, and her next step is to explore the different kinds of information, resources, and potential weapons the kitchen has to offer. Some of these are more useful than others, but there are also details whose importance might not become apparent until later, making thorough and exhaustive exploration of each space incredibly important. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen drawer is a no-brainer and while it might be tempting to take a quick glance at the pictures and notes pinned to a bulletin board before dismissing the whole lot and moving on, there could be a partially visible document buried in that whole mess that holds the key to solving an important mystery later in the game. 

Some of the specific clues don’t make a ton of sense, narratively speaking. For example, there are notes about old room service deliveries and maintenance orders that would have (or should have?) been fulfilled before the hotel closed for the season. In terms of making sure everything is properly tidied for the end of the season and in light of Stuart Ullman’s detailed-oriented personality, it doesn’t seem likely that these odds and ends would have been just littered around the hotel following the end-of-season cleaning, but the clues have to come from somewhere. A page from Grady’s diary makes some sense, but a written note from Grady to Jack seems a bit less plausible (though these are powerful ghosts, so who’s to say, really?). 

Players play collectively as Wendy and Danny, and have several options and different choices they can make. However, making the wrong one proves disastrous and there are LOTS of ways to make the wrong decision. Ultimately, the game is intended to follow the action of Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980) and if players veer off course, they end up with what the rules call an “unscripted ending.” When this happens, one of the characters dies, “the movie has ended,” and players are instructed to go back to their last decision and try again, but this time presumably make the right decision. Players track their “unscripted endings” over the course of game play and each of these wrong turns counts against them when final points are totaled up at the end of the game. Even exploring the Overlook and using the characters’ assigned actions (look and use for Wendy, look and shine for Danny) can backfire in damaging ways: if the players choose to look, use, or shine on an object or location that proves invalid, they are similarly punished, this time through having to turn over a Grady card, which has negative repercussions for the characters and gets Jack one step closer to being freed from the pantry. If players get stumped, there are available clues, but accessing these clues requires turning over a Grady penalty card as well. 

All in all, Escape from the Overlook Hotel gives players the opportunity to navigate and interact with the Overlook in a much more detailed way than Properso’s The Shining board game, from rifling through the kitchen drawers to trying to figure out the switchboard in the office. The different physical props and game pieces that players unlock and use along the way add a fun tactile element to this exploration. The trial and error process of navigating the hotel and trying to discover clues can definitely be frustrating, though this arguably contributes to a sense of claustrophobia and desperation, as players try to figure out how to Escape from the Overlook Hotel.