In Sink: A Co-op Escape Adventure Review

Ever since the dawn of the Flash game, I have loved escape rooms. There’s something about the inventive puzzles, varying locations, and brain-steaming thought required that simply keeps me coming back again and again, be it in a physical escape room or videogame form. As such, I was pretty excited to give Clock Out Games’ two-player co-op puzzler, In Sink: A Co-op Escape Adventure, a thorough look through and see if I can actually make it out!

Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way: yes, In Sink is reminiscent of Total Mayhem Games’ We Were Here series. However, it should be noted that while the games do have the commonality of puzzles focusing on communication between parties, they do go about it in different ways and are, to me at least, different enough not to be a case of copied homework.

The story is pretty basic, though that's fine as it’s definitely not the focus: a father and son wind up on a deserted island without a means of escape except a weird machine that can open up portals to different areas. Each area hides a crystal that will unlock more areas and, hopefully, an exit. The characters themselves do not speak and the game itself is basically languageless, instead opting for colours, shapes, and symbols to convey the different puzzles the intrepid escapees are charged with solving.

Each portal, or level, is a distinct area with its own visual theme and puzzle design, such as a pirate crew's cove, a noir investigation, and even a haunted house! The puzzles also get progressively more complex, though the difficulty may vary depending on the players. You can pick items up to look at them (with the appropriate spinning of said object one may expect), but you can’t carry anything with you, so every puzzle needs to be solved with nothing but your wits and some buttons or switches.

As stated earlier, the two players pick either the “adult” or “child” to play as, though the two differ only slightly. The adult weighs more and can therefore solve some puzzles that the child cannot, but on the other hand, the kid can crawl through small gaps to reach new locations. I’m unsure if the characters’ solo sections differed in difficulty at all, as I had assumed the child may be a bit easier to allow for parents to play with their actual children… but my wife and I saw little difference.

In general, the puzzle designs were fun and intuitive, with some imaginative areas. We especially liked a level set on moving trains that had great puzzles with both players feeling equally useful and active. However, there were a few levels that were less enjoyable and possibly even frustrating, as they featured either confusing sections, annoying timers, or sometimes both! For example, in the haunted house, we were supposed to go through multiple sets of three doors, using details to pick the correct one out of the lot. However, we ended up finding the correct one by chance more often than not, as we had no idea which detail was prevalent.

Elevators, the bane of all animation!

At this point, you may be asking why we didn’t just use hints. Yes, the game does have a decent hint system where you can simply press a button and get some images giving either a clue or a partial answer, but the issue with said system lies in the languageless nature of the game itself. Whilst I definitely appreciate having a puzzle game not rely on language — and having each puzzle piece be differentiated with both a symbol AND colour is very good accessibility — the lack of any text or instruction can be frustrating when you’re not sure you’ve even understood the puzzle. This may be more of a personal gripe, however, as my wife and I both are the type of puzzle solvers who need to understand WHY something is the answer in addition to the answer itself.

Returning to the topic of the levels, I do enjoy the fact that they are so varied both in style and location, as the change between levels feels refreshing and gives a pretty tangible sense of progression. To add to this, the hub area you start the game in also gains new decorations after each completed level, slowly changing it from a drab cave to a drab cave with boxes and chairs in it. While I jest, I honestly love this kind of attention to detail in games, as it makes coming back to the hub feel more rewarding and exciting, rather than just the interactive loading screen between stages.

In terms of sound design, there’s not much to say. Each stage has its own theme and the “you did something right” sound is clear. As you’re mostly talking to your partner throughout, the background music is mostly just some low ambient, which is fine. The controls are also pretty much standard, as you don’t really need much more in addition to walking, interacting, and a sprint button for the impatient speedsters (like me!). The only issue we had with the controls was the jumping, which had a bit of an odd lag. While normally not a big deal, it becomes a bit of a problem when quite a few puzzles require you to jump on a deadline! We (I) also managed to soft-lock ourselves a few times due to elevator-based shenanigans, though the multiple checkpoints per level made sure we didn’t have to start too far back.

Ironically, one of my biggest gripes with In Sink’s puzzles was subsequently fixed during the time of writing this. As you cannot pick anything up, the game expects you and your partner to remember multiple shapes, colours, and sequences. While this is fine in moderation, the number of times we had to backtrack to recheck something was a bit frustrating. Now, we could have simply used real-life pen and paper, but that felt like defeating the point a bit. Lo and behold, on one of the recent updates, a journal feature was added, with the ability to draw shapes. You can even ping things on the level! So points earned there, Clock Out Games.

The other gripe, however, remains. It is a bit of a petty one though: having to redo multi-stage puzzles if you fail one step. In a few instances in a level, you’ll be tasked with a puzzle that has multiple steps to complete. For example, in one level we needed to jump across a room on platforms controlled by the other player. If one player fell off a platform or missed a jump, we were forced to go back to the beginning of the challenge, even though we had already “solved” parts of it. It’s a smallish thing, but when you’ve tried to make that one hard jump multiple times, only to have to reset again, the number of errors pile up alongside annoyance.

Now, despite my few issues, In Sink is a solid co-op puzzle game. The puzzles are most certainly fun and it’s always exciting to see what the next level has in store! However, I do recommend taking it a few levels at a time, as the small issues it has may start to annoy with time. Clocking in at around nine hours for our playthrough, it does offer a fair bit of content and will make you feel clever once you figure out each puzzle… though it may be infuriating when you are stuck and the hints are unhelpful. Regardless, grab a friend, hop in, and come up with great ad hoc names for the symbols. Our favourites were ping-pong and fat snake.