Man, the old internet sure was something back before it became so sanitized and advertiser friendly. Before popup ads were hunted to extinction and the great Flash purge… back when the thousands upon thousands of various online flash escape room games were still playable. You know, the ones where you find yourself in a room and have to get out by solving puzzles, opening locks, and so on. Sometimes you may find yourself thinking “Man, those were the days… wouldn’t it be fun to be in one of those and able to walk around and stuff? I mean there’s my local escape room place but it’s too far away and expensive and I need a reservation and whatever…”
Well, hypothetical reader, do I have the game for you!
Discolored 2 is very much inspired by these classic escape games of old. While the game is not yet out and scheduled for a 2023 release, it’s clear that this much is true from the demo. I will say that this is definitely a prerelease look and not indicative of the final result, and to keep that in mind when reading. I will also say the game is an escape room game and there’s not a lot I can say about it without spoiling some of the puzzles. So keep that in mind too! So with that being said, let’s get started.
Discolored 2 is the sequel to previous game Discolored. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with jumping in without having played the first one. Granted, it’s possible there’s some stuff that simply doesn’t come up in the demo, or there’s some mechanics in this game that puzzled me that it assumes you learned in the first. On the surface though you don’t feel like you’re stumbling in too blind.
In the world of Discolored, color is vanishing, and whenever something turns monochrome, it just kind of… stops working. Not just breaks- even sentimental things like plush toys or books or anything that has a mostly emotional function will just kind of stop provoking that reaction. And troublingly, if a person becomes monochrome they start to seek to take all the color from the world. So that’s bad! Luckily there’s an agency working to fight them. You play as a member of this agency, having just finished up a mission in the desert (see Discolored 1). There’s a woman in a red coat who may or may not be the playable character? If she is, it’s weird because you encounter her in the demo, but if she’s not it raises a lot of questions about who you are and how you fit into this mess.
The red-coated woman grabs a mysterious green prism and drives off with it, not noticing she’s being tailed by a nefarious looking grayscale gentleman, who somehow invokes the powers of red to steal a car and follow her without even getting inside it. That’s about as much story as you get, but I got to admit I’m intrigued. It just seems like a vaguely horrifying threat that the villains are up to; there’s something threatening on a deep personal level about a world where you can’t even really seek comfort in simple joys.
Anyway, that’s when the game jumps you into as close to a tutorial as you get. A room that explains the basics of moving, puzzlesolving, and aquiring and combining items. Typical escape room stuff. However, a couple interesting things happen during this first part. First off, you gain a thing called the viewfinder, which allows you to travel through certain pictures. It’s only used at a few points in the game, but intriguing ones, nonetheless. Secondly, you are attacked. After you solve a puzzle, the grayscale gentleman appears on a monitor and uses the power of red again to seemingly hijack the camera feed and flow into your room or attempts to. You are given precious few seconds to figure out what to do before he manifests and steals all the color from the room, presumably including your own. Should this happen, you simply continue from right before you solved the puzzle. It’s a simple puzzle but it takes a few seconds which can be a little irritating. Anyway, you certainly don’t get attacked in most escape rooms, virtual or otherwise, so it’s an interesting choice. Gives a nice sense of danger.
After you get through that little scrape you wind up in the game proper. It’s a multistory affair where you wander around several rooms doing escape room stuff. However, it soon becomes clear what the game’s main gimmick is: there are various prisms scattered around. When inserted into their slots, color enters the world and things change based on this. When not, everything that once had that color is a drab gray, which can be helpful in some situations.
There is also a third gimmick that’s related to the viewfinder that I personally really enjoyed, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. There are no problems contained within it that seem worth spoiling it for. That being said, the game did have a few issues that stuck out to me. One of the first and most noticeable ones was the fact that there are a lot of devices in this game that seem to do something. Seem to being the important part. You look at them and ponder but clicking on the various buttons and switches gives no feedback or information why. While some adventure/room escape games will say something like “The power’s not on” that gives a hint as to why you can’t do a thing with a given panel or whatever, you get no such luxury in Discolored 2. This is alleviated by the hint function in the pause menu that can steer you in the right direction. It’s very much appreciated, but more on that later.
Of particular note was a puzzle I encountered in the second quarter of the game where you had to reveal a panel in the wall. With the color green enabled, this newly revealed panel looks like it contains a large and very pressable-looking button, framed by some diagonal green lights. However, clicking on it has no apparent effect. I was baffled until I happened to turn off the green, thus removing the green bars that I felt had not been suitably shown as being an obstruction.
In a couple other points, completing an objective would add color (and therefore power) to something but then have no clear indication that I could now do a thing with it aside from having gained color. A chair may be green but just because of that it doesn’t mean you can’t sit in it while it’s black. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but my brain had a hard time of latching onto that concept.
A few other more minor nitpicks: this game does somewhat continue the flash point and click adventure game trend of ‘you need to click on this thing that is very hard to see’. This section is better explained with pictures than with words. Here’s a hallway you get to halfway through the demo. Take a good long look at it. See anything that looks important?
Once you get to this point in the game, you need to press a hidden button. I couldn’t find anything that seemed to indicate this aside from the in-game hint button telling me where to look. Another item is hidden in a similar hard to see spot, but it only comes up twice in the game thankfully.
I’m just going to fill a bit of space here to stop you from scrolling too fast. Like… this could be a “me thing”, like I said. It’s possible I could have just missed or misunderstood the clues telling me to find this thing. Maybe my eyes just kind of slid past it. But I’m of the opinion that in escape type games, things you can interact with should be fairly signposted as such. You can hide stuff, especially if you’ve given earlier precedent to hidden things being a thing to get players looking, but in general I believe that it’s important to guide the player through your puzzles and not go ‘oh, you should have pressed that square inch of the wall behind a lamp.’ Speaking of, CLICK HERE if you want to see the hidden button.
To be fair, this would be more of a problem without the hint function in the pause menu. At any point, you can pause the game and get a hint, free of charge. They even start out vague, giving you the idea of where to look, before a timer starts ticking down that will allow you to see a more specific one if you need it. There’s no penalty or anything; it’s just a good option if you’re stuck. Just a little wary of having to rely on it, you know? Of course, as previously stated this is all moot if there is in fact some clue somewhere I missed. It certainly seemed like there were some clues I wasn’t able to use for anything.
Past that there’s just some little nitpicky things. Held items disappear if you click on something you aren’t supposed to use them on. Opening the inventory means you need to close it before you can actually use the item. Sometimes it’s hard to use a thing on a part of the environment because you’re not close enough, or you are close enough but haven’t clicked to zoom in on the thing in question.
Aside from that though, I’m intrigued. I will be keeping an eye on this one. As I’ve said, this is a prerelease demo, but even at this early stage the story is intriguing despite the lack of info given, and I’m eager to see if the antagonists can use colors aside from red for nefarious purposes, or if different colors have different functions for them. Plus, there’s the matter of who the player is anyway. To progress at one point, you wind up draining a man in red of his color to power up a prism and then you just go on your merry way like you don’t just have a man in a jar for emergency red harvesting. Someone trying to save the world for the greater good? A bad guy the whole time? An undisclosed third party? And what the heck is up with the viewfinder thing you’ve got anyway?
The demo seems interesting enough that I think I’ll check out Discolored 2 when it releases in 2023. Hopefully they manage to smooth out some of the rough spots first though.
