Cabin Escape: Alice's Story

If I woke up one morning and found that my better half had locked me in the house, leaving a breadcrumb trail of enigmatic clues as to the key's whereabouts, it would probably lead to some stern words upon her return.

Alice doesn't seem remotely bothered that her husband has left her in just such a predicament.

But then, Alice is a rather fragile amnesiac who hasn't been taking her medication.

It's an intriguing premise with slightly unsettling undertones, as you might expect from the prequel to Forever Lost, but Cabin Escape: Alice's Story never reaches full-on spooky status.

This is a compact, almost gentle three-room puzzler that once again goes for The Room-like cleverness. Once again it falls short, but it's still an entertaining effort.

Alice's cabin contains interlinking logic puzzles that must be solved in sequence until you find that front door key. You might need to apply paint cleaner to a kid's picture in order to uncover a three-digit code for a safe, or find a way to paint the eye of a rock monster in order to… well, we'll leave that for you to find out.

This combination of home-spun warmth and technical lock-box challenges is at the heart of Cabin Escape: Alice's Story's charm.

I also liked the camera system, which allows you to take snaps of clues and then doodle notes across them for later reference - although it seemed to take a second or two too long to bring up these pictures on my iPad 3.

While Cabin Escape: Alice's Story is relatively brief (I'd say there's an hour or so of gameplay), I won't lie: I got stuck part of the way in. As is often the case with these games, it was a simple oversight on my part.

What annoyed me is that an earlier clue that would have dramatically lessened the likelihood of this oversight was inexplicably repeated elsewhere in the world, which left a missing link in the game's linear chain of events that eventually came back to bite me.

Eventually, I gave in and paid 69p to unlock the hint system, but even then it took some doing to trace precisely where the trail had gone cold.

I won't spoil the game at all by going into too much detail on this, but suffice it to say that I felt this hitch largely stemmed from a failure in the execution of the game's graphics - something we had issues with in Forever Lost.

In a game that's more reliant on meticulous artwork and barely tangible visual signposting than most, Cabin Escape: Alice's Story isn't quite as skilfully executed as it needs to be (and nowhere near The Room's standard).

This means that frustration tends to be directed at the game's systems rather than your own failure to come up with a solution.

Like the real life scenario mentioned in the intro, escaping this cabin is a satisfying experience - but one that might carry with it a lingering dose of resentment.