Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool review - "A seriously challenging puzzler"

• Escape a time loop
• Challenging puzzles
• No hint system

Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool is essentially a point-and-click adventure escape room that really tests your problem-solving skills. You’ll solve tricky puzzles using nothing but your own wit and objects hidden around the mysterious bunker where you find yourself trapped. 

Break Free of the Time Loop in Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool

After running out of gas in the desert, you come across a mysterious door. Inside, you’ll find a computer asking if you want to play a game. The only rule is don’t go into the pool. Once you drop through the trapdoors, you’ll find yourself in a room with a pool in the centre, lockers to the left, and a door blocked by lasers and public showers to the right. 

Get used to this room as you’re going to spend a lot of time here, or at least in different variations of it. You’ll soon realise you’re not just tapped in a bunker - you’re also trapped in a time loop. Other than this interesting premise, there’s no real narrative.

You’ll simply keep solving puzzles with no context as to the origins or purpose of the strange bunker. Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool could really have benefited from adding in a few documents to find, giving you some background on the odd time loop you find yourself in.

Collect Glitch Cubes to Unlock Doors

In true point-and-click fashion, you’ll need to solve clues to obtain items you’ll need to solve yet more puzzles. At one point, you’ll spot a suspicious mannequin floating in the pool. Of course, since entering the pool goes against the rules, you’ll need to find a creative way to retrieve it. 

Throughout your adventure, you’ll come across big green cubes called glitch cubes. These cubes can be placed on pressure plates to unlock specific doors. Sometimes one of the cubes you need will be locked away, so you’ll need to figure out how to obtain it before using it.

This puzzler doesn’t pull any punches, so you’re really going to have to flex your problem-solving muscle. You’ll be working your way through six variations of the same escape room, with puzzles growing progressively harder to solve as you go.

Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool Doesn't Hold Your Hand

Some of the puzzles you’ll face in Mini Escapes are quite perplexing, so it’s easy to find yourself stuck if you’re not a problem-solving pro. Which is why I was so surprised to see there is no hint system. While there’s certainly something to be said for arriving at solutions on your own, the lack of a hint system can be alienating to less seasoned escape room fans. 

When you consider you may need to jot down a few notes while solving some of the tougher clues (for instance, when deciphering Mini Escapes' version of Morse code), it seems like a poor choice not to include even a basic hint system.

Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool is a super challenging escape room sim. Gameplay is easy to pick up, and it feels very rewarding when you finally solve a particularly harsh puzzle.

Unfortunately, the lack of a hint system means puzzles can quickly become vexing, especially as you progress through later chapters. Overall, Mini Escapes: Infinity Pool is a solid point-and-click puzzle adventure that could really use a good hint system.